Grenson's Bold, Beefed-Up Oxfords Are the Answer to Boring Footwear Fatigue
SHOP $560, grenson.com
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It's no surprise that, in fashion terms, we've all gone a bit soft in our dress habits during the last 12 months. Now, however, as the first green shoots of spring and, along with it, the first reliable intimations of a new (sort-of) normality return our daily lives, we’re already (cough) rebooting our wardrobes into going-out mode. And we’re doing it from the ground up.
Exhibit-A, for your inspiration, is UK shoemaker Grenson’s Gresham Triple Welt black oxford, and it’s a belter. Bypassing sneakers and transitioning all the way from socks to actual shoes may sound like a giant leap for mankind at this point, but it behooves us to explore the possibilities of more structured clothing again, in order to properly distance ourselves from our slovenly ways.
Tim Little has been CEO and Creative Director of Grenson since 2010. He is largely credited with bringing the storied 165-year old brand into the 21st century. And he did it by bending age-old skills to the creation of interesting new shoes. The Triple Welt was the result of a little off-duty experiment by one of his shoemakers. “Five or six years ago,” he tells me, “one of our guys in the factory who does the welting, came to me with half a shoe he’d been playing around with, made with offcuts of leather. He’s a real craftsman and he’d been trying to puzzle out a different way to make a welt.”
One of the odd things about the ingenious Goodyear Welt—devised in the 19th century to fix the sole and uppers together in a strong, seamless, and waterproof way (important in the British climate)‚is that all the craft in making it gets hidden when it’s sewn up. Little was looking for way not only to show it off but to celebrate it.
“We made up a single pair, then refined it,” he says. “What it did was take a classic shoe and made it quirky—not looking like it was a fashion thing, but something straight out of the shoemaking craft. I showed them to a few retailers, and they all went nuts. The Triple Welt has become the best-selling style of all our Made-in-England factory shoes.”
The broad, rounded toe of the Gresham makes it a multitasker, suitable for dressing up all sorts of casual pants, or even a suit…if you can remember what that is. The oxford construction makes for a tidy closed front and a cap gives added weight to the toe. The construction makes this a solid shoe too, particularly if you’ve not been wearing socks for a year, but it’s just the thing for creating a solid and stylish foundation for your new outgoing self.
SHOP $560, grenson.com
In Northhampton, the Midlands town that is the spiritual home of English shoemaking (Think E. Green, Lobb, Crockett & Jones) and Rushden, the town next door where Grenson was established, they know a lot about shoes. But Grenson nearly didn’t make it. “When I took it over in 2010, it was pretty terrifying,” says Little. “It was a loss making company; we had no outlets in London; it was a dead-in-the-water business, an old-old school business and not in a good way.”
Little set about to dust out the cobwebs. “The first thing Grenson needed was understanding what it was good at; we needed to get into its heritage, the type of shoes it once made and how it made them. And with the Triple Welt, we took care to ensure the design is timeless, so it won’t look silly next year. A lot of what we do you, in fact, you could have seen on the street 60 or 70 years ago, and you will still see 60 or 70 years from now.”
The company was started—like a lot of the great Northampton shoe brands—on the idea of making something would genuinely last. If it did, people would come back and buy more, and they could also have their old ones repaired. “That’s come full circle now during the pandemic,” says Little. “People are talking increasingly about buying less, about buying things that are built to last, and also about mending. It’s a form of sustainability statement. At Grenson, we’ve been thinking like that since 1866.”
SHOP $560, grenson.com
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