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John Laughland
The sudden rush to the head, the sense of breaking a taboo, the delicious feeling of joyful surrender to temptation . . . you
never forget your first time. Long waves of gentle pleasure follow, and although later fixes, compulsively repeated, never have that same sharpness of the initiation, the habit nonetheless acquires a momentum and an inner logic of its own. In short, my habit is impossible to kick. This is not so much because of the intensity of the addiction, but rather because the habit itself is used for kicking. I refer to the pleasure of buying and wearing some of the best (and most expensive) shoes in the world.
Like other addictions, my predilection for the shoes made by John Lobb is bound up with the personal details of my life. I used to live in Paris, and John Lobb's own history is as much connected with that city as with London. When the original John Lobb, born in 1829, started to make luxury shoes, he opened shops in the British and French capitals: the Paris branch was eventually bought by Hermes in 1976. My own first purchase was in the Hermes flagship store in the Rue Saint-Honore about ten years ago. It was soon followed by similar extravagances committed in the Rue Francois Ier, and later in the tiny boutique in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, just round the corner from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques where I was a lecturer for four years. This shop had the advantage, for me, of being right next door to my bank — although the convenient location was a considerable inconvenience for the bank balance itself.
More important still, my first Lobb shoes were bought for me by my then girlfriend, whose taste for the finest clothes and objects was legendary. Those shoes, as it happens, were subsequently stolen from a rental car I had parked in the Via dei Vascellari, just off the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, along with a haul of clothes and jewellery worth tens of thousands of pounds; we were returning from a wedding in Umbria. But that unfortunate incident was soon transmogrified into a source for new indulgence when it occasioned — yes, you've guessed — a further discreet visit to Lobb's in Paris to replace the lost items.
Times change, and girlfriends too. My new girlfriend is slightly censorious about sartorial extravagance, especially since it is way beyond the means of a feckless writer like me. She is quite right, of course, and so I have to invent arguments to justify myself. The best ruse I have discovered so far is to say that while a pair of Lobb shoes cost about £500 (and I have eight pairs, which, while not quite in the league of Imelda Marcos or Barbara Amid, is at least a start), the outlay they represent is a tiny fraction of that involved in, say, my brother's purchase of a sports car. That seemed to work — but for how long? No doubt my beloved thinks that my brother has made the manlier choice, and perhaps this is the real unspoken reason for her reproach: it's much sexier if your boyfriend has a fast car than an old bike and immaculately polished loafers. Lithe subject comes up again, I may threaten (somewhat implausibly) to start having my Lobb shoes custom-made. That costs more than £2,000 a pair.
Apart from their elegance, Lobb shoes are notable for their names. My most comfortable pair, for instance — smooth black lace-ups that are essentially designed for evening wear but which also serve excellently as day shoes — is called 'Richelieu'. I have always admired the great cardinal for his combination of piety and ruthlessness, as well as for the fact that he incarnates the magnificence of 17th-century France. My latest acquisition, an incredibly elegant pair of punched Oxfords, are called 'Philip II', which suits my Counter-Reformationary sympathies. An extremely useful and reliable pair of rubber-soled dark semibrogues, which I always take on trips to Eastern Europe because of their extreme resilience, are called 'Russell' — my late father's name. And so on.
A curious feature of these shoes is that they always seem to be the right temperature. Cheap shoes — such as the £20 pairs I picked up on the south coast of Spain — are always too cold or too hot. By contrast, my suede loafers — slippers, really — are excellent for indoor wear in England, but they also go perfectly with linen trousers for drinks in the heat of a Caribbean evening. In winter, there is a pair of suede boots with elastic sides and finger-tabs at the back. They make you look a bit like Robin Hood. who presumably had to commit numerous acts of right-on robbery to pay for his.
There is only one set of circumstances when [wear shoes from another maker, and that is when skiing, or in very harsh conditions of wet or cold. Then I wear thick boots made by a company which set up shop in the Alsace in the early 1930s, Heschung. They must have shod the wholesome, bronzed-faced youths who stomped up hillsides in leather shorts to attend all those Franco-German camping expeditions that did so little to prevent the outbreak of war. Heschung has a shop in the Rue du Vieux Colombier in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, just by the No. 63 bus stop. The boots have a high ankle made of canvas, and very good rubber soles: it is extremely difficult to find good-looking boots, and Heschung is definitely the business. Mine have lasted for years and have been given very severe treatment, yet they often attract compliments. I occasionally take them off to admire them, thinking they would look splendid if painted by Van Gogh. Heschung boots are about half the price of Lobb's shoes — they cost
275 euros a pair — and 1 strongly recommend that Spectator readers, who might be accustomed to thinking that English shoes are the best in the world, pay Heschung a visit the next time they are in Paris.
No shoes last for ever, and every five years or so a pair can no longer be repaired. Then, it takes a while before I can muster the funds to replace them. But when I finally take the plunge and buy a new pair, I always justify the outlay with the simple — and, as far as I know, unanswerable — question: why make a virtue of a necessity like shoes, when you can make a luxury of them instead?
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