Mephisto has dedicated the past 60 years to making elderly walking sneakers so perfect that modern sportswear makers can't resist their charm. Adding the brand to Highsnobiety’s Good Shoes Directory was a no-brainer. But now, it’s much more than its most famous product. 

In its debut collaboration with vital Japanese mega-retailer BEAMS, Mephisto released its first merch to accompany a duo of waterproof walking shoes. The two designs were simple, including a “Mephi-Tex” dad cap, honoring Mephisto’s answer to GORE-TEX, and a white tee advertising Mephisto’s most popular models. But they signified a big development, where a niche French shoemaker’s name holds so much weight that one of streetwear’s most esteemed retailers wants it on a T-shirt.

This moment is more than Mephisto.

Fellow fine footwear countryman Paraboot, a century-old shoemaker from a small alpine village, is also capitalizing on its recent virality (last year, shopping platform LYST reported a 226% year-on-year increase in searches for Paraboot’s Michael model) by going beyond handsome leather work shoes. Paraboot diehards can rep a blue workwear two-piece of twill chino pants and a boxy bleu de travail jacket from a recent Universal Works collaboration with the newly released striped OBEY x Paraboot shirt where embroidery of the French shoemaker’s logo covers the chest. 

Birkenstock's German sandal empire has similarly expanded into stylish workwear with its recent 1774 collaboration with Song For The Mute, which included more clothes than cork-soled slip-ons. Co-branded T-shirts, mechanic-style jumpsuits, and pre-distressed denim overalls all supported Song For The Mute’s three-piece artisanal Birkenstock sandal drop. This admittedly isn’t Birkenstock's first wearables the shoemaker has dropped the occasional piece of clothing and even a line of Tekla pajamas, but it is the sandalmaker's first complete clothing collaboration in its over 250-year-old history.

This all signals yet another win for the elderly footwear movement. In the wake of dad shoes becoming everyone’s semi-ironic favorite shoes, there’s been an increasing interest in even more elderly cordwainery like that offered by Paraboot and Mephisto and Birkenstock. We’ve even put out a call for people to “steal Grandpa’s shoes,” but it looks like that’s only the beginning. Grandpa’s footwear favorites are now entering our wardrobes.  

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