’Tis the season of the sensible shoe
This week, I went to meet Edward Sexton, a master tailor. Oh joy. Sexton is a legend of Savile Row (although these days his studio is on Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge). The quiet brains behind the flamboyant Tommy Nutter label in the Sixties, it was Sexton’s sharply lapelled suits that The Rolling Stones wore, that three of the four Beatles strode across the cover of Abbey Road in.
Bianca, Naomi... they’ve all been kitted out in Sexton. When Stella Mccartney was working at St Martins, it was Sexton who taught her about tailoring. He worked on the patterns for her graduation show and later for her debut at Chloé, where Stella and her then sidekick Phoebe Philo were widely credited with bringing a new generation of female customers to the joys of tailoring. Now 76, Sexton is still going strong – and as you can see, as snappy a dresser as you could hope for. It was about 32 degrees when we met, with the usual levels of London air conditioning (ie none), but no surrender to sloppiness here. Don’t you love the pristine lemon socks – which picked out the lemon in his shirt. I took lessons for my own personal
style. And on the subject of sensible sandals – this surely is the definitive take on how we wear them.
And we do wear them, because this is the season (which, if we’re lucky, might stretch to an entire era) of sensible shoes. They’re everywhere, from Marni to the culty Off-white. Comfortable, practical and delightfully orthopaedic looking.
This isn’t just excellent news for our feet and backs, but our bank balances. Accessibly priced brands such as Clarks, Geox and Fitflop have always done sensible shoes. Now that Fitflop has removed the branding from the outside of its shoes, I’d say they’re excelling in the Marni-lite department, while my colleague Victoria Moss reported recently on these pages that her mother’s Geox collection looks eerily like Commes des Garçons. So ugly they’re edgy could be the new shoe movement’s motto.
Enjoy while the era of sensible shoes lasts.