Remember Desert Boots?

Sure you do. Actually they have never really gone out of style for the die hard fan but I probably stopped wearing them myself sometime in the 80's. 

how to wear desert boots

The original desert boot that I knew and loved was designed in 1949 by Nathan Clark of C & J Clark, the shoe-making family based in the UK. Its inspiration was a crepe-soled boot made from rough suede in Cairo's fabled Old Bazaar for off-duty Eighth Army officers based in North Africa during the Second World War. But it seems that this version was based on the shoes worn by South African soldiers which were themselves based on Dutch voortrekkers' veldtshoen shoes. Schier Shoes is a Namibian brand that has been making veldtshoens (affectionately called vellies) since, believe it or not, 1935.

But wait ... the provenance goes back even further. Veldtshoens forefathers are thought to have been made in southern Africa by the Khoe people (know pejoratively as the Hottentots) before the arrival of the Europeans.

After Clarks debuted their design at the Chicago World's Fair in 1950, these comfortable shoes were quickly adopted for the preppy look in the US and later immortalized by that great style icon of cool, Steve McQueen. They have been an essential element of many style movements, worn equally enthusiastically by groups as diverse as mods and British Army officers. 

Brother Vellies

I became re-acquainted with the desert boot and newly acquainted with its history when I was searching for appropriate footwear to buy for our upcoming trips to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park and the Kalahari Desert. I found a distributor in NYC called Brother Vellies who makes an updated and very stylish version of my old desert boot featuring tribal patterns, springbok suede and neon colors. The shoes are made in South Africa, Kenya and Namibia by a handful of skilled artisans and assembled at the workshop in South Africa by a small group of men and women who assemble a few dozen pairs of shoes a day by hand, using techniques refined over multiple generations. (Brother Vellies bought the fore-mentioned Schier Shoes.)

 

Lemmi & Sipho

They seemed perfect for my needs except for the fact they they are distributed from the US. Since it made no sense to me whatsoever to order shoes from the US that were originally made in SA just to ship them back across the ocean from whence they came, I instead searched for a local alternative. I found it at Lemmi and Sipho in Cape Town. A mother and daughter design team, they took my bespoke order online and my vellies were ready to be picked up in two weeks. Reunion time.