Can You Perfect the Beautifully Imperfect Paraboot? He Thinks So (EXCLUSIVE)
David Keyte has been wearing Paraboot’s Michael shoe for about half of the famously quirky 80-year-old derby's life. He bought his original pair from the very first Paul Smith store, which opened in Nottingham in 1970 and Keyte worked in his youth. “We used to sell them,” he grins. "So, I got a discount!"
Keyte, the founder of British menswear label Universal Works, finally got the opportunity to design his perfect pair of Paraboots. The end result, ironically, includes a fair share of imperfections.
“For me, it's not about ‘perfect' things, but real, honest, authentic things,” he tells Highsnobiety, pointing to the marks in the leather and small variations in stitching caused by Paraboot's patient shoemaking process.
These individual inconsistencies inspired the name of his debut Paraboot collection, "La Beauté Dans L’Imperfection" (French for, of course, "The Beauty in Imperfection").
Here, the Paraboot Michael receives a new leather build that's, as always, made by hand in Paraboot’s Saint-Jean-de-Moirans factory within the French Alps.
“David wanted to find a leather that could be used on both sides, with a fairly ‘hairy’ reverse side to give the material a deconstructed look, highlighting the perfect appearance of the smooth side of the leather and the imperfect appearance of the other side,” says Pierre Colin, marketing and communication manager at Paraboot. “This calf leather, with a specific tanning process, met the criteria.”
Those contrasting textures becoming the focal point of the shoe’s monochromatic uppers. It’s a relatively small update that's knowingly understated.
“I was tweaking a classic, so I did not want to go too far," says Keyte. "Just give it a small Universal Works spin.”
The designer has spent the past 16 years reimagining the blue-collar garb of his working-class family through Universal Works. The company is still based in Nottingham and primarily utilizes small-scale producers to cut its clothes.
There are salient parallels between the histories of Universal Works, founded in 2009, and Paraboot, founded nearly a century earlier in 1908.
Both companies remain in the rural hubs in which they were founded and retain traditional methods of production, even while attracting international clientele.
“I am a big lover of factories and simple, honest makers. Paraboot embodies this in spades,” says Keyte. “For me, their shoes exist in that spot between tradition and the modern, between casual and formal, between working shoes and smart shoes.”
The duo’s collaborative shoes release on October 23 via Universal Work's website alongside a concise capsule of co-branded clothing that presents a similar juxtaposition between the rugged and refined.
"I wanted the ‘workwear’ element of classic French blue jackets," says Keyte. "The idea [was] that these pieces could almost be the staff uniform," not unlike the Paraboots that Keyte and his coworkers wore at Paul Smith so many decades ago.
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