Leather boots have a place in your wardrobe, no matter where you live. Here are five reasons why you need them..
by Leon Pantenburg
I don’t work for any footwear company. This post is strictly my opinion, based on decades of use.
Growing up, I never gave much thought to my ankle-high leather boots. I was raised on an Iowa farm, and the work shoes were standard for all of us farm kids.
The work boots were do-all footwear. That’s what you wore to bale hay, shell corn, work in the fields, fix fences, tend to the farm animals etc. Come pheasant season, my barn boots were also my upland game hunting boots. There was not much thought involved in what footwear to wear – you went with what you had.
So I remain slightly bemused when the ankle-high, brogan-style “clodhoppers” (as my wife describes my usual, everyday footwear) were adopted by city dwellers as fashion items. Maybe some of the city folks may want to change their images…what guy doesn’t want to appear manly and rugged? Kanye West and Ryan Gosling frequently wear Red Wing Classic ® Moc boots in New York City. Jack Nicholson, Oprah Winfrey, David Beckham, David Letterman, Bradley Cooper and others have been seen in leather work boots.
Ryan Gosling wears his Red Wings downtown.
Why leather? Well, full-grain leather is traditional and sustainable and has a solid, rugged look to it. The material wears like iron. The right boots (for you) can be a wardrobe investment. Leather work boots are a good option for anyone wanting to add a rugged workwear style boot to their collection. They are a great choice for a weekend at the lake or the cabin, with potential forays into town for dinner.
Here are five reasons you need quality work boots:
1 – Buy a good pair – you will wear them a lot. Good leather boots may initially seem spendy, but that’s because the quality materials in them aren’t cheap. Full-grain leather boots, with reasonable care, may last for decades. You can pass the footwear to your appropriate decedents with the same size feet.
2 – Foot safety: Work boots are designed for craftsmen and women who may may be handling heavy items and doing hard physical work. When I worked on a construction framing crew, my nail apron and tool belt could weigh 10-12 pounds. A hydraulic nail gun with nail strips was another 10 pounds. That’s a lot of weight added to your feet in your footwear when you might be standing, climbing and working all day. When I worked in a transmission factory, I was on my feet all day on concrete. This lead to a “born-again” shoe experience with protective toes in boots.
As a newspaper journalist for decades, my day was never predictable. I might go from a Kiwanis breakfast meeting, to covering a flash flood, to rushing to a traffic crash, to a dinner meeting that night. (This was not an unusual scenario for any reporter!) My footwear had to be protective, while looking appropriate for the situation.
As a journalist in Washington D.C., I bought insulated leather work boots that could be polished. My standard winter apparel might be a wool fedora, wool suit underneath a long wool coat and my insulated boots. This was a very practical selection to survive in wintertime D.C.!
As a working journalist, I regularly wore jeans and six-inch leather work boots. In this 1982 photo, I was wearing Wolverines.
3 – Consider where they will be worn: These boots are typically what you throw on for a quick trip to the grocery or hardware store. Because they are so non-descript, unremarkable and undistinguished, they match any outfit. The footwear blends in. The boots pair well with denim and other casual clothes. They also make a fashion statement – these are the boots a confident person wears because the footwear does the job.
These are the boots for your “grey man” look, when you have to walk in sketchy areas during a disaster and don’t want to attract attention.
4 – They may double as your hiking boots: If you are walking on a city sidewalk or on a flat, established trail, you probably don’t need aggressive treads on the soles. In fact, those mountaineering boot treads may put unnecessary excessive wear on wilderness trails.
My first hiking boots were a pair of full-grain leather Georgia® logger boots. There was no conscious decision one way or the other on what to buy – I could afford the Georgias, and couldn’t afford a pair of high tech hikers. I put several hundred miles on the loggers until they finally gave out from high mileage, rough usage and basic neglect.
Couldn’t pass up the chance to tell this story again: I bought those original loggers at the War Surplus Store in Powell, Wyoming. On a whim, some 25 years later, my wife and I stopped into the store while headed home from a Yellowstone vacation. The manager, turns out, was working there 25 years ago, and it is possible he could have fitted the boots and sold them to me. He mentioned there was a pair of loggers in the back from that original Georgia shipment. He brought them out and they fit me perfectly. Naturally, I bought them on the spot, along with a pair of Sorel winter snow boots for my wife. You can’t make this stuff up!
My Georgia logger boots had several hundred rigorous mountain miles on them before they finally wore out.
5: The boots may be a fashion statement: The “clodhopper boots” have been mentioned in GQ magazine. An Iowa farm kid like me would have laughed at the idea that some city slicker would think work boots were cool and fashionable. But remember the “Urban Cowboy” hat and boot craze in the early 1980s? And how about the rugged, lumberjack-looking clothes from a few years back? Never say never when it comes fashion whims.
The nice thing about this current leather work boot popularity is that the boots will last a long time after the fad fades. And that’s a good thing!
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