At the end of December I received an email that I just couldn’t resist – a message about the Jeffery~West sale. I went to their website, just to have a look, you understand, and discovered that the Rochester Rafael boots were now half price. Even better – there were several colours left in my size! After much deliberation I decided that I couldn’t live without this fabulous red mock-croc pair.
They arrived really quickly, were a perfect fit, and I was thrilled to bits. I wore them once, took them off when I got home, turned them over to show the design on the sole to my husband… and was horrified to discover that they looked as though they were falling apart!
A worried email and a couple of phone calls to Jeffery~West later, and a lovely lady called Kirsty was able to reassure me that this is not the case.
I knew that the soles of these shoes were blake stitched rather than Goodyear welted, but I hadn’t realised what difference this type of construction would actually make. Because the soles are stitched directly to the uppers without a welt, you get a shallow channel around the very edge of the sole. To stitch the upper in place, the leather is cut with a knife and peeled back. Once the stitching is complete, the leather is pressed back into place. If the sole of the shoe gets damp, this channel can open up. Thankfully it can also be pressed back down again – and once I’d done that and worn the shoes a second time, you’d never know that this had happened.
What I will need to keep in mind is that these shoes won’t be as robust as my Sylvians, and I should probably save them for summer. I’d never go out in the rain in leather soled shoes anyway, but this is England, and sometimes you just can’t avoid walking on a wet pavement!
For anybody interested in the technical details of the differences between blake stitched and Goodyear welted shoes, W. Sanford (bespoke tailors and shoemakers in Shanghai) have a really interesting article, with diagrams. I’ll be studying this for future reference…