Surprisingly, perhaps, for a term that yields 345 million results on Google, there appears to be no industry consensus on where the phrase “model off-duty style” originated. Popular in the early 2000s, around the birth of street style, it came to denote Alexander Wang skinny jeans, a grubby tank top, an Acne Studios “Velocite” shearling jacket and a mop of bed-head hair. Today, thanks to social media, there’s little formula to models’ pavement looks – with one exception: a pair of Dr Martens boots.
Bella’s got them. Gigi’s got them. Kaia, Candice, Kendall have got them. And where the supermodels walk, others follow: profits at Dr Martens surged by 70 per cent in the year to the end of March, with online sales rising by two thirds. Since 2014, when the company was acquired by the private equity house Permira, it has almost tripled its annual revenues to £454 million.
Read: 14 Pairs Of Heavy-Duty Boots To Ground Your Autumn Look
The lug-soled boot with the distinctive exposed yellow stitching chimes with a bigger trend for autumn/winter 2019, where heavyweight boots flooded the catwalks. At Prada, The Row, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen, bovver boots were paired with everything from minimal camel coats to exquisitely worked evening dresses. Faced with an unrelentingly negative news cycle, sandwiched between global climate change marches, designers spoke of the need for clothes to combat “romance and fear,” as Miuccia Prada put it. And what better than a pair of boots that could quite literally kick ass?
“There is a toughness about our product” that is key to Dr Martens’s appeal, according to Andrea Moore, global marketing director, who joined the brand earlier this year. “People use the word “durable” in our research, and I wonder if that has some relevance with how people are feeling at the moment in terms of Brexit,” she told Vogue, in a phone interview. “I was at one of the marches and saw a lot of people wearing them – it’s representing the mood of the people.”
Fans of DMs reference the feeling of “invincibility” a pair of the chunky boots can lend. Daisy Hoppen, whose PR company DH-PR reps brands including Ganni, Molly Goddard and Aesop, has two pairs. “Over the last month, I’ve worn them almost every day – from fashion week shows, to an event at Frieze Masters, with a black velvet evening dress, and for a Dover Street Market rave, where I wore them with a Comme des Garçons bubble mini skirt and danced in them for hours,” she says. “They’re just so practical. I don’t have to think in the mornings. I just pull them on and run out the house.”
As the company nears its 60th birthday in 2020, the best-selling Dr Martens boot is still the 1460 style, the original eight eye boot, in smooth black leather. “It’s surprising how little [that boot] has changed over the years,” says Moore. “We may add quadruple soles to give an alternative look, but the original product doesn’t look out of place today. And what’s really interesting is that it’s such a diverse range of people who wear them – supermodels, footballers, musicians.” A new podcast series from the brand, Talking Tough, which launches this week, captures those diverse stories. Meanwhile, the brand has invested £2 million in its Northampton factory, aiming to double production in the UK by 2020, with 165,000 pairs of shoes made there every year.
At Paris Fashion Week, you couldn’t move for lug-soled boots. As lithe young models exited shows, weaving between cars as they searched for their motorbike taxis, they posed for street style photographers, daring drivers to advance over their well-protected toes. For as Hoppen says: “They’re the ultimate commuter shoe – no one dares to step on your feet.”
More From British Vogue:
