UK GQ Magazine – February, 2003

By Richard E Grant

I remember people’s feet like other people remember facial features. I grew up in Africa, so bare feet were what I saw first before looking aloft to the physiog, the sub-tropical climate ensuring maximum exposure of, and to, the naked foot. The regular colonial arrivals from Blighty’s idea of tropical chic was the open-toed sandal with socks. The wisdom of this foible escapes me, other than as a sure-fire antidote for sex – which for clergymen is marginally understandable.

I often prayed for socks though, having been assaulted regularly by the tyrannosaurus toenails of an overzealous Sunday school teacher. An especially sadistic maths master tortured me, fraction by fraction, by wearing the trademark “out of England” socks and sandals combo. The only maths I could hope to master would involve subtracting his legs from his feet.

The indelible scarring brought by prolonged exposure to “hammerheads” and bunions provoked a lifelong appreciation for shoes. For me, new shoes signaled the start of a new term and with it the pain of “wearing them in”. Which can be translated simply as: three weeks of blistering and bleeding, limping around in hobnailed torture chambers, while being bawled at to “Take it like a man!”

The Seventies swung their way south of the equator, along with my little bollocks, my voice choosing to crack rather violently mid-history lesson as I was reading out my treatise on Mussolini and the rise of his Blackshirts. I took refuge in staring at my Clark’s shoes, willing them to dissolve into the floor and take me with them.

Platform for boys followed, but were scorned as poncy till we realized the instantaneous sexual advantage of being four inches taller, our new hooves fashionably hidden by galleons of bell-bottomed denim. Cosmopolitan warned that just when you thought you were safely steering yourself into seductive waters, the wrong shoes were tantamount to bad breath.

Within an historical nanosecond, anyone still stomping about in Scandinavian clogs to Abba or wearing Cuban heels and a white Travolta three-piece got punked by the Sex Pistols. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee flick dictated boiler suits, stove pipes and bovver boots.

The worst shoes I ever encountered belonged to my uni roommate: a pair of old trainers which he left “cheesing” on the windowsill; they had a flavour not even a nuclear odour-eater could quell. It’s hard to believe that one night these rubberized stink-bombs accidentally threw themselves to their death four floors below.

There’s a great moment in An Englishman Abroad when the traitorous Guy Burgess entreats a friend to go into John Lobb to order a custom-made pair – shoes being a luxury more longed for than a Paxton cheese, the Sunday Times or Floris cologne behind the Iron Curtain. I promised myself that one day I might go into John Lobb and order a pair, knowing that credit card meltdown would surely follow.

By chance, while organizing a charity clay pigeon shoot to raise bursary funds for academically gifted by cash-strapped kids wanting to go to my old school in Swaziland, Waterford-Kamhlaba, I came into contact with the PR for Laurent-Perrier (which supplied the bubbly). In passing she asked if I had ever bought shoes from John Lobb. When I detailed my shoe obsession, she organized for me to meet top Lobb-ster, Mark Kernick, who not only offered me a pair, but also had the idea of doing a charity Lobb-link. “How about you co-design a shoe,” he said. “We’ll call it the ‘Richard’, and donate a percentage from the sale of each pair to your charity.” Done!

Fast forward to a meeting with the John Lobb designer, Helen Botterill. I worked with her to develop a design for the ‘Richard’, which is based on the Chelsea boot, before Eurostarring off to Paris for a fitting at Lobb’s Paris workshop. This involved every inch of my feet being measured and made into a wooden last for a millimeter-perfect fit. The factory, just off the Bastille, is real The Elves and The Shoemaker territory; and having taken a step into the world of haute couture ‘shodding’, I am reminded that Prince Charming found love when matching up a pair. What more could a boy ask for, other than to get Nancy Sinatra to play us out with a rendition of “These Boots Were Made For Walking”? Boom boom.