Old Glory Thigh boots

As custom bootmakers we get a lot of colourful requests from our clients but none more colourful or more fun to design than the pair of Old Glory Thighboots we made for one of our Los Angeles-based clients who wanted to wear them to a Republican party rally. Our brief was to create something cool but classy, with platform soles and tall fine heels, and using the stars and stripes of the American flag as the basis of the design.  Putting all those elements together in a elegant and coherent fashion proved to be more complicated than we originally envisioned.

            Finding a pleasing design was the first challenge. After much head-scratching, sketching, fiddling with compass and pen and a wastebasket filled with crumpled pages of our sketchbook, we finally settled on a winner. The next trick, of course, was to take what we had dreamed up on paper and turn it into a stunning thighboot, one that fitted beautifully, would be comfortable to wear and cut a patriotic dash at the rally.

            Back to the drawing board - or rather, back the cutting board. Long experience told us that in order to achieve the desired look we would need to use different leathers to create a visual contrast in the elements of the flag design. After more trial and error we settled on patent for the dark blue field, and white patent for the stars. For the red stripes we selected a glazed kid, to be offset against a slightly grained calfskin for the white stripes. 

            Once we had settled on the leathers we would use, came the fun of actually putting all these elements together in a sleek and seemingly seamless thighboot. Given the complexity of the design we did a trial run first, using gash leather, before we attempted the real thing. Only when we were satisfied that we had the bugs worked of the cutting and assembly process out did we start in for real, using the fine leather we had chosen for the design.

            Hand clicking the leather for a pair of boots such as these this takes a considerable amount of time. To say nothing of all the preparatory 'sciving' of the leather - a process bootmakers use when joining pieces of leather to keep seams from becoming unnecessarily bulky - that was required prior to assembly. After that the boots followed the normal, painstaking process in our workshop of shaped and being built on a last. Platforms were custom cut, prepared and shaped out of high-density cork blocks and finished with the appropriate leather. The heels were staked and similarly finished. Then the boots were cleaned and buffed, packed in a box and sent to our client in Los Angeles - who wore then to the rally and reported they were a sensation. Feeling on a roll ourselves, we made another pair of these glorious thighboots and put them on display at the Grand Prix d'Amerique horse race at the Hippodrome where they created quite a stir.