The Care and Feeding of my Wolverine 1000 Miles , a set on Flickr.

A short while back when I posted some pics of my Gustin Loomstates on reddit.com/r/rawdenim, I found I got a fair number of questions about how I kept my 1000 Miles looking so nice. The biggest part of the answer was that they were only 2 weeks old, but that's not the whole answer, because although I've had them a short time, they have not lived an easy life. It's been a particularly icy winter, but that hasn't stopped me wearing them most every day. These are some of the most magnificent boots I've ever owned, but I can't bear to baby them, they were made to be worn, and and wear them I shall, but life on my feet is not easy for a pair of boots. I seem incapable of wearing a pair of boots for any time at all without scuffing them, and walking a couple miles through ice and snow and salt on a daily basis necessitates some good maintenance practices if I want them to last me a long time and keep them looking good. So these are the maintenance practices I'm adopting specific to these boots. I expect they will evolve with time.



I'm finding Chromexcel leather to be excellent in wet and icy conditions. It's a very oily leather, that's impregnated with a lot of different fats and oils as part of the tanning process, and as such it is naturally very water repellent. Having done a little research on how to maintain it. I found that Horween recommends a fairly moderate approach. First pure neatsfoot oil which is one of the last oil used in the tanning process. For finishing they recommend VenetianCream, which is a neutral colored cream polish, but it's not easy to find, and since I can't get it locally, I used Meltonian Neutral cream polish which works very well for my purposes, and is available for $3 at my local shoe shop. I prefer not to use a colored polish, because I really like the way CXL color shifts as it bends and creases, and I don't really want to cover that up, but I also don't like the look of the light scratchy scuff marks I seem to collect on a daily basis.

Here's the step by step: