The Convoluted Story of Desert Boots
Desert boots
do you have desert boots?
I used to have a pair of desert boots,
in fact I used to have two pairs.
I didn't have two pairs at the same time.
I had one pair and I wore them until they wore out.
Then I got another pair. they're pretty good boots
because they're so versatile from a fashion standpoint.
You can wear them with semi dress pants
or jeans
or even shorts.
you can wear them out hiking
well let's say light hiking,
or you can wear them into a nice restaurant.
so I was wondering,
how long have they been around?
The First Company
I did a little research on desert boots
and found out that the Clark company was
the first company to really popularise them.
One of the brothers in the company,
Nathan Clark,
was fighting in the war in World War ii.
I don't know if he was really fighting,
but he was in Burma anyway and his brother sent him a message.
His brother told him to try and find good designs
for new shoes for their shoe company.
Discovery
Nathan Clark did just that.
He looked around and watched what the officers
and soldiers were wearing
and he saw them wearing chukka boots.
It was on his way home through Egypt however
that he was able to source the boots and buy them in a market in Cairo.
The officers who were fighting in the desert in Egypt wore these boots as well.
They were almost the same design
but they were called desert boots, naturally,
because they were in the desert.
But that wasn't the end of the story.
Too Busy
Nathan gave the design for the boots to his cutter
who was supposed to cut the leather and make the boot with it.
However, the cutter was just too busy
keeping up with his work
that he couldn't get on to making a sample pair of the new boots.
Nathan went to ask him several times and eventually
he ended up cutting the leather and making the boots himself.
Another Hurdle
But that wasn't the end either.
These boots were not popular with the board of the company.
The board thought they would never sell
and they would never be popular.
Well this didn't stop Nathan,
He was transferred to work in another part of the company outside of Britain.
Take the Initiative
He was working in Australia when he made the boots
and started to Market them there and they became somewhat popular.
He started to move the boots into other markets
and finally he got into the American market.
It was just after the end of World War II
and the American economy was starting to chug into action.
That meant that people had money
and they wanted to buy things
and they wanted to level themselves up.
Esquire
Nathan got an interview with Esquire magazine,
who was promoting popular higher culture at the time.
Some of the people that Esquire was portraying
were wearing the desert boots that Nathan's company made.
This combination pushed the boots into popularity in North America
and they haven't looked back.
Humbler Origins
But where did these desert boots really originate?
They didn't actually originate in Egypt or Burma.
Rather, they originated in South Africa.
The Boer farmers living in South Africa
made simple leather shoes called veldskoene.
The name of the boot is a very simple name
coming from the words for field and skin.
The boots were made out of simple animal skins
and they were made for walking in the fields.
So the humble desert boot originated from the humble Dutch Farmers living in South Africa hundreds of years ago.