Sexy Life Style

“The time has come, the walrus said,
To talk of many things.
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings.”

No plans yet to write about cabbages. But it is certainly time to talk about bespoke shoes. I set an appointment last week to go see George Glasgow at GJ Cleverley to be measured for my first pair. Rather as I did previously with suiting, expect a series of posts here on every stage of the process.

There’s something rather charming about being measured for shoes. At Cleverley the first stage is to stand on two facing pages of a book, so that your feet can be traced onto the paper. It feels rather odd standing on a book to begin with, but doing so in your socks in The Royal Arcade, while a man such as Mr Glasgow runs a pencil around your toes, is even more peculiar. Still, here stood stars of stage and screen alike – not to mention royalty.

When the shoemaker is tracing your foot the key is to keep the pencil upright. The smallest change in angle will mean a millimetre difference on the last, which can be the difference between comfort and pain.

He will also sweep around your instep, with the pencil at 45 degrees, in order to indicate the height of your arches. Looking back through the Cleverley measuring book, there is a substantial difference here between men. Some, like myself, have almost an inch in difference between the outline and the inside of the arch. (“Healthy and strong,” Mr Glasgow called it. He’s such a tease.) Others have merely a few millimetres. They will require greater support inside the shoe, and the waist will not be able to cut in quite as far underneath.

The length of your foot is also measured. At Cleverley this is done with a wooden rule dating back to 1928. It still looks in pretty good shape – no doubt due to the substantial brass fittings at the joint. While this length is a good guide for the shape of your last, it will always be made 1½ sizes longer than the measurement, to allow for your big toe rolling forward as you put your weight on the ball of your foot.

(As an aside, this difference is only one size on a slip-on shoe. It has no natural mechanism to tighten onto your foot, unless the model includes elastic at the sides, so the fit has to be tighter.)

Next the circumference of various points is measured. First your joints – between the base of your big and little toe. Then just behind the joints, to give an indication of how quickly the foot narrows. Next around your instep – roughly where the top of the laces would be. And finally from that same point on the top of the foot to the back of your heel.

The thing that struck me as these measurements were being taken was their consistentcy. At each point my right foot was 10-and-something inches, while my left was usually 9-and-something. Height just replaces width as you move towards the back of the foot.

It also put into numbers what I already knew, that my right foot is almost a half size smaller than my left, but significantly wider. While the first is very common, the latter together with a narrow heel makes me a good candidate for bespoke.

Finally, Mr Glasgow ran his hands over my ashamedly hot (not to say sweaty) feet. He was looking for any bumps or peculiarities, such as hammer toes, swollen joints (most common on the big and little toes) and spur bones around the heel.

Many of these are caused by men wearing ill-fitting shoes for much of their lives – or shoes that have not properly been worn in or maintained. Mr Glasgow found no such oddities, most likely because I am too young for my feet to have distorted much.

As a final point, some shoemakers insist on measuring a man’s feet at a particular point in the day. Your feet grow in size notably as you walk on them and keep them encased. Cleverley does not consider this significant, not even noting the time the measurements were taken. For Mr Glasgow the natural give of the leather is sufficient to cope with the daily fluctuation.

Next: styles and designs

I was fortunate enough to be able to tour the Edward Green factory in Northampton last week. A new building (as they’ve moved around a few times since leaving what is now the John Lobb factory in the centre of town) it nonetheless has a lot of atmosphere and personality. This is due in no small part to the personality of the staff, who delighted in teasing each other about which job best showed off their talents, or indeed which angle was best to photograph them from.

One aspect that particularly caught my eye was the hand sewing of the apron on a Norwegian split-toe. This is the Sandhurst, a pattern revived from the 1930s archives that was the precursor to Edward Green’s famous Dover. It has been updated in two different styles to celebrate EG’s 120-year anniversary: a grain leather version in tan, with a round toe and external welt to give it a country feel (202 last), and a dark-brown calf version with a severely squared toe that would look well in the city (888 last). Two very different looks with the same model.

The apron has to be sewn by hand because the two parts of the upper are at right angles to each other. A machine can stitch two parallel pieces of leather in any arrangement, but it can’t do angles.

The sewing is done by pig’s bristle that is bound to the thread, which it draws through a small cut made by an awl. The bristle is narrower than a metal needle and can move through the leather at angles a needle cannot.

The hand sewer prepares the pig’s bristle by cutting off its root, sanding the broken end to ensure it’s sharp and then splitting the other end to allow it to be bound with the thread. Several strands of yarn are then twisted together with the split bristle and rubbed down with beeswax. The thread is then rubbed hard with leather to melt the wax, ensuring that thread and bristle are bound together. The beeswax also helps seal the stitching on the shoe.

Doing the operation here is Gary Finedon, who joined Edward Green when it split from Lobb and has been hand sewing for 20 years. He makes around 20 such uppers a week, as does Green’s other hand sewer, Andrew Peach.

It’s important to develop a rhythm and not stop halfway, as that usually ensures the stitches are evenly spaced. So of course I interrupted Gary with about four stitches to go. He tactfully finished the last few while listening to my questions, then put the apron down to give me his full attention.

I never realised that the reason the split-toe seam has that distinctive finish is that this same hand sewing technique is used on the inside of the toe, to join the front two pieces of the upper. It’s that hand sewing underneath that creates the dimpled effect on top, which is so often highlighted by the polish.

I was also fascinated by the refurbishment process at Edward Green. There seemed to be a lot of old shoes around waiting for this treatment, and the picture here shows the sock of one pair that had been worn away pretty badly inside.

The two main reasons shoes are brought in is that the sock has worn away or the collar on the top of the heel has split. The latter is usually due to men not using shoe horns, stamping down on the collar and gradually destroying its structure. The thread that runs around the inside of the collar will often split as well.

Edward Green replaces the sock and insole, resoles the shoe and repairs anything like the broken collar. Everything but the upper, which retains its personalised contours, looks just like new. Not bad for £180.

My thanks to Euan, John, Hilary and everyone at Edward Green for making me feel so welcome.

Polishing leather shoes up to a brilliant shine is an extremely enjoyable pastime.

Nathan Brown over at Lodger always says that one of the problems with being an entrepreneur is that he never gets the time to sit down and polish his shoes any more. George Glasgow at Cleverley has complained to me of the same thing. Lodger’s store manager Clement has the opposite problem: he spends all his time polishing shoes but never his own, just the ones on Lodger’s shelves.

Personally I like to spend a good half an hour over a pair while the wife is watching something atrocious on the telly. It is meditative, engaging and rewarding.

I think it’s rewarding for two reasons. First, with no other piece of clothing does maintenance actually improve the item. It just puts brakes on a natural decline. Brushing your suit only returns it to the state it was that morning. The same with ironing a shirt or repairing a button. The best you can do is get back to zero.

Polishing your shoes is more akin to wearing a canvassed suit and feeling it mould to your body, or indeed wearing in the upper of a shoe. Except that, with polishing, greater effort is rewarded with greater results. Not only is it a positive activity, it is one you can control.

The second reason is the wonderful aesthetic experience. After you’ve applied the first layer of polish, and then returned with more polish and a touch of water, you can see each circle of your finger produce a swirl of brightness, getting more intense and reflective with each repetition. It is as if your fingers are coaxing out pure light.

But don’t apply too much water. Just a dab of it the first time and only occasional top-ups later on. The cloth remains damp for a while, and too much water can soak into the leather and make it hard to carry on polishing. This is particularly true on thinner or more flexible sections, such as the bridge and instep. The toe and heel, being more rigid and reinforced by internal pieces of leather, can take a lot more.

For each layer on the toe and heel (don’t do more than one layer elsewhere), carry on working in the polish until the surface is super-smooth, like glass. Until your little swirls make no perceptible difference to the surface. Then take a tiny bit more polish, and repeat. Don’t stop until you can tell the time on your watch in it.

‘Relocation relocation’ is on TV. I’m off to fetch my Cleverleys.

As I've mentioned before, a friend of a friend runs a shoe brand called Fin's. Great value for money, handmade in Portugal and just small enough that you're unlikely to know anyone else with a pair (unless you happen to know Alexandra), her loafers/driving shoes are pretty comfortable and come in some nice pastel colours.