desert-boots-635.jpg

Planning on flexing your sartorial muscles in the blog arena? You’ll need to come packing. And no, we’re not referring to your pocket square game. Every week on The Eye, we’ll cover a basic term you need to know right now... before you get laughed off the internet.

Seventy years on, who would have ever thought that a young British soldier’s wartime distraction would become the inspiration for one of the world’s most recognizable shoes: Clarks Desert Boots. The year was 1941, and the soldier, well he wasn’t just any infantryman, he was Nathan Clark, and he’d been sent to war with two missions. First and foremost to protect his country, and, secondly, to discover some new shoe designs for his family’s company. As a member of the Eighth Army, Clark had been deployed to Burma, and it was here that he noticed that the officers in his formation were wearing these strange, sand colored chukkas during their downtime. Clark investigated the shoes and learned that they had originally been commissioned to Cairo cobblers by South African soldiers whose old-military issue boots had failed them out on the desert terrain. They wanted something that was both lightweight and grippy which led to creation of a boot with a suede upper on a crepe sole.

For the soldiers stationed in unfamiliar territory, the design made sense, it was comfortable, wouldn’t bog them down, and it could take on any surface no matter how rough. Nathan thought he’d found exactly what the company needed, so he began sending sketches back to his brother Bancroft, at the Clarks headquarters in Somerset, England. Unfortunately for Nathan, the English footwear tradition had always leaned toward the formal, and a pair of suede chukkas was considered too lower-class for Bancroft’s tastes, so the concept remained dormant until his return.

September cover man Cam Newton rocking Clarks Originals