Thread by @RJdeMans

OK, entering the menswear guy’s breach again. This poast in derek’s tweetthread about the shallowness of most media about luxury fashion, especially luxury craft fashion like custom shoemakers, got stuck in my head like a Steven Seagal Epic Guitar Solo. Let’s explicate/explode it

https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1644084950944350209

It’s got it all: the reflexive words like craft, the status-sucking references to “the world’s most elegant neighbourhoods” and to the supposed trend for stealth wealth or quiet luxury with words like “understated”, along with the thesaurus-ravaging pretention of words like...

“aegis”, “cobbling” [a cobbler was originally someone who scribbed and scrabbed and cobbled together repairs to shoes, a shoemaker was a cordwainer, or to be really posh, a bootmaker] and words for the three main types of shoes, two of them inexplicably...

... in title case as if the writer were Donald Trump… The allusion to over a half-century of tradition, with a founding in 1958... All of this is basically ChatGPT style:

A way of pretending to know what you are talking about by rehashing the most obvious and commonly known features of a topic.

As derek had said, writing about this stuff isn't done by specialists, and even folks who might be somewhat knowledgeable tend to be doing it for free stuff so won’t say anything bad... or even insightful.

A published author from a well-known literary family once told me he'd love to write about nice clothing so that he could get free stuff! I don't know why he likes the stuff that I write, then. It's possible to like nice things and yet think critically. Hell, it's possible to...

... like nice things yet dream of a more socially fair world. Anyway.

What's in a name? George Cleverley shoes might have been founded in 1958 but the one the author is writing about opened in 1991. After the man himself had died. So it’s named for him the way Sam Adams beer is named for the founding father.

There had indeed been an earlier George Cleverley shop, where the man had made shoes for Winston Churchill and Terence Stamp. The thing about namedropping Churchill as a customer, though...

... is that – leaving aside his more serious genocidal sins – practically every shop in the West End had him as a customer because he loved nice things and didn’t like to pay his bills. So he bought on credit and seems to have moved from one maker to another quite smoothly.

Terence Stamp though was and is a connoisseur, who would talk about nice shoes including his old Cleverleys at the drop of a James Lock hat. In fact, it was an interview with him in 1993 where I first ever read the name Cleverley.

[Aside: “a soldier-turned-shoemaker”: I warrant that in 1958 most able-bodied British men over a certain age were soldiers-turned-something, thanks to world events and the waning requirements of Empire.]

Cleverley closed his business back around 1970, around the same time Terence Stamp moved from London to India. He retired, and then was hired by a couple of other West End shoemaking companies to mentor staff:

First the bootmakers Henry Maxwell, in the 1970s, and then, in the 1980s, the Jermyn Street shop New & Lingwood, which used to have its own custom shoemaking service. There, Cleverley met George Glasgow and John Carnera, who were working in the shoe department.

Around 1990, New & Lingwood’s new owner made some changes to the business that resulted in the custom shoemakers departing. Glasgow and Carnera left and went out on their own, opening the current George Cleverley shop a few months after Cleverley himself had passed away.

Why? Because he was famous to those in the know about such things... and because people did gravitate towards indices of well-established tradition like that famous name...

Cleverley had been famous for creating a very elegant chiseled toe shape for his shoes. That became a trademark of the new firm that bore his name.

It's always talked about like some sort of magical thing, but it's not. It's just a well-designed sleek toe shape where the your shoe tapers to a slightly sharp, slightly squared end. A talented shoemaker can do it; it might take more work to make the proportions right for...

some shapes of foot, but not all Cleverley shoes have perfect proportions either!

Beyond the shape of a shoe, though, a good shoemaker has to nail fit, which is harder to describe in a catchy way because it’s specific to each individual foot. Being able to reconcile good fit with an elegant shape so that a shoe has both is what makes a great shoemaker.

This new company did well and at least initially did well by its customers. It was at the time it opened very much an upstart. The established firms were places like John Lobb, unassailably entrenched in its history, Henry Maxwell, Foster and Son… the latter two...

...eventually merged as there was less and less call for custom shoes. Ironically despite its famous name, the new company still had to make its name. People like Bryan Ferry became customers (I suspect he followed them from New & Lingwood, which had made his shirts for decades).

I have a pair of custom shoes from this Cleverley that I ordered in 2010 – they’re good! But as with any custom maker, it depends on who is doing the making. The firm had done well enough for multiple shoemakers to join and work with them.

I don’t think Mr. Carnera himself had carved many lasts in a long time! Tony Gaziano of Gaziano and Girling had worked there, among others, and the person who took my order and to my knowledge made my shoes was Dominic Casey, who has left.

Maybe in the past the prestigious name of a West End firm was a guarantee. The legend was that a bootmaker good enough to have a shop in St James's or a tailor a storefront on Savile Row wouldn’t let inferior quality out the door. My friends and I theorize that's from when...

... more people could tell what bad fit or bad make was. It takes time to figure out what fits and what doesn't! Because good custom is so rare and so expensive no one wants to read that it can take three or four orders (at frightening prices) before the fit is really nailed --

not least because a dumb customer (me) doesn't realize what's supposed to flex and what isn't?

Anyway, as derek wrote, many established companies are living on their reputation. · What else can these craft firms live on? It's not scalable.

There _have_ been tailors, for example, that scaled up – Burtons, DAKS-Simpson for example were formed as enterprises that allowed tailors to make garments to order quickly. They evolved into ready-to-wear department stores because that is the natural trend of scaling up....

... for efficiencies. The time it takes to make something individually sized, let alone individually designed, was not economical at scale for them. And, on the other hand, as fewer and fewer people wanted custom because of its fussiness of ordering,

its inconvenience (multiple visits to order and fit! The wait between each visit!), its rarity, the people who wanted custom often _wanted_ its exoticism – not a modernized, efficient version. I’ll note that what I’ve read about outfits touting a modernized and efficient version

of custom suggests that most of them are simply trying to sell a factory-made tweak on a standard size garment. Which might be fine if they have standard sizes that aren’t just 40R, but 41S, 37 XL, and so on, but creating well-designed patterns for odd sizes is, again...

... , complicated and expensive, so most places don’t.

Anyhoo, back to shoes. In the 2000s, Cleverley, like its tailoring homologue Anderson & Sheppard, saw the writing on the wall. It had to find other ways to sell itself and build its brand if it wanted to do more than subsist in a byway of Mayfair. It found that path in...

...courting Hollywood. George Glasgow, Jr. set up in west LA for a while, and (I’m not sure how, given that stylists who dress celebrities usually favor luxury ready-to-wear brands and that those clothes are often lent or gifted rather than sold), got its shoes on various...

... action stars – certain Expendables, the Rock, and so on. He even had an infamous DM exchange with a potential customer where he bragged about covering the feet of "Mr Statham" and "Mr Stallone." Frankly, I would be more impressed with Mr Van Damme

It seems that from Derek’s experience and that of many poor devils on styleforvm recent Cleverley custom shoes are not well fitted or made unless you are a celebrity

(Judging from Craig’s fits as Bond and on the red carpet, he doesn’t seem to mind bad fits, so maybe he’s easy to satisfy) · Perhaps this is an artifact of expansion, and they’ve taken so many orders they aren’t prioritizing quality control or attention to fit except for VIPs.

It also seems to reflect turnover in the staff who actually craft the shoes: the people who transform measurements into a last that the shoe will be built on, who create the pattern and select the right pieces of leather to place and cut, and so on

They’ve built a brand, for now at the expense of reliability, and it’s a new generation of independents we should look to for the custom service, conviction and commitment that a West End address used to mean for a custom maker. People like @shoesbynoonoo , Casey, Emiko Matsuda

I wrote the book about _French_ shoemaking and it’s linked in my bio (The book, that is, for people who actually can read). I note that I haven’t noticed the same phenomenon in Paris, in that if you want a pair of good French custom shoes you will still find incredible work from

say, Anthony Delos and his colleagues at Berluti, although there are good smaller makers as well.

o Oh and here’s the epic guitar solo by the self-styled “King of Improv” himself: