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À la Mode
Column
À la Mode
Mr. Bootblack is a philosopher with distinct views of his own. He earns a living cleaning shoes. Once every two weeks he writes an article about footwear for GDS – and about the wearers.
When the golf shoes come out I know my customers are getting ready for summer. Trips out to the Hamptons where the air is clean, polo shirts radiant white and the drives leading up to the golf and country clubs long enough for the vintage cars people have in their garages there. At least that’s how I imagine it. Never having been there myself. But that’s the way I would do it if I had made my billions. I like things classical. For a man from the south I have a lot of New England in me – which really means Old England and a bit of America. There are rules and I like that – I stopped being able to follow fashion from the colourful 70s, if not before. Not women’s fashion, that was always exciting, the whole time. But men’s fashion I don’t get at all.
Edwin is an old man now and I can tell by looking at him how old I have myself become - because he was one of my first customers and he’s only a dozen years older than me. He started on Madison Avenue in the 60s when advertising was still an exciting business and got very rich before taking a top job at a TV channel. A lot has changed over the years but one thing has stayed the same: his golf shoes. He had them made some time back in, my god, it has to be well over 30 years ago – full-brogue, black and white Derbies with a vamp made of coarse grain leather and, actually, a delightfully decorated, fringed tongue tied over the shoe laces to protect them from wet grass. Over the years he had new tongues made while the shoes themselves were only repaired a few times.
“With a new, snow-white tongue the whole shoe looks like new,” he would always say. But this time he arrived with the shoes nude of their protective, decorative tongue. Black and white brogues, with old-fashioned metal spikes obviously – but still surprisingly inconspicuous like this without their perhaps most striking feature. “What’s happened to your shoes, Mister Edward,” I asked, “was the shoemaker indisposed?” He immediately knew what I meant. “Times, they are a-changing, Bootblack,” he said, “I had a think about it and decided they might look a bit too … feminine with the fringes on them? But I don’t really know.”
I took a look at the wonderful old shoes he had looked after for decades and wore, truth be told, no more than ten times a year. I looked at him and he looked at me. A young man walked passed sporting an army jacket over a kind of vest worn over his chest muscles like a décolletage. Edward’s eyes followed mine. “Male and female pointers aren’t what they used to be anymore,” he said. And I nodded.
We looked at his swaying hips that he somehow moved weightlessly despite the heavy boots he was wearing. “It’s … ,” began Edward, “the way he walks …” I nodded again. Then I looked at him. “We’re getting old Mister Edward.” He nodded in agreement. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s too late to change my style now.” I shook my head. “It’s never too late to change your style. But it was always wrong to conform.”
