The Brancusi of Boat Shoes (EXCLUSIVE)
Is the great Constantin Brancusi too titanic a figure to invoke the name of boat shoes? Depends on the boat shoe, really. In the case of Colbo's Sperry boat shoe, the great sculptor is vindicated — or at least his precepts are.
Here is a boat shoe pared back to the platonic — Brancusic? — ideal, a softened shape so free of pretense that it practically collapses under its own lack of weight.
When Tal Silberstein, wearer of an earth-toned uniform and cofounder of coffee-depot-meets-cool-clothing-store Colbo, describes his collaborative Sperry shoes with words like "primitive," he invokes the same notion of pared-back perfection as Brancusi's streamlined birds and appendages.
This shoe is also a pure object. Too pure, even, for whatever lingering stigma might've followed the boat shoe through to its recent revival. Not that Silberstein minds either way.
"I was super intrigued by [American boat shoe norms,]" he says. "Honestly, they just made me think like, 'OK, how do we take it to a higher level of craftsmanship and leather and detail? How can I make these not preppy.'" Where one might've seen frat dude folly, Silberstein spied a shoe crying out for considered evolution.
He proposes a boat shoe shaped of a sumptuously plush upper and rigid leather sole, a self-contradicting silhouette born of Sperry's 1980s-era handstitched shoes. "Really unstructured, really loose," Silberstein says of his Sperrys, available on Colbo's website and store from July 10 and from Sperry's website as of July 14.
Were it not for recognizable elements like interwoven leather laces and the moccasin toe, you might mistake Colbo's evocatively named Sperry boat shoes for artifacts recovered from a tribe of nomadic WASPs. "Weathered Sahara" and "Distressed Taupe" sound like superlatives better used for describing lived-in slippers. Though, with their crushable heel, Colbo's Sperrys get pretty close.
"It's not fun to wear leather shoes because in the beginning, they're super tight, super stiff. That's such a bummer," Silberstein says. "Whenever I got a new pair, I used to like jump on them, run them over with my car or my bike like, 'How do I fuck them up?'" His Sperry are thus a beautiful blister solution.
"They're already super soft, super distressed. You don't feel like they're too clean." These are shoes to be worn right now, sans stress or pretense, recontextualized toe-to-tip in a manner akin to Colbo's PORTER bags.
"It's about ease" Silberstein says. "Like wearing them without socks on the beach or wearing with a suit to a wedding. But fucked up with white Nike socks would also look sick."
Maybe there's some hope for the frat dudes yet.
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