London's menswear mini boom has fired up a new wave of cobblers. Leading the charge is Marc Hare, whose label, Mr. Hare, is tantalizing footwear freaks with its Dover Street Market debut and its online presence at Oki-ni.com. Hare himself is the kind of stand-out character who could only have evolved in London's unique bouillabaisse of high and low culture. ("From red carpet to surf"—Hare's summation of his design ethos is practically his autobiography.) His natty dreads have been a fixture on every scene since a pre-modeling Kate Moss used to hang with the BMX boys at his shop Low Pressure. He did marketing for Doc Martens and Sebago, then opened—and closed—a store called Something, which reintroduced Londoners to labels like Balenciaga.
Hare's innate instinct for marketing shows up in the names he gives his styles. Take the Orwell, for instance (below). It's a patent-and-stingray Oxford with a distinctive blaze of white on the vamp. "With that one pair of shoes, you could dress like a tramp and fit in anywhere," he says. (In other words, if you're George Orwell, down and out in Paris and London.) Fitzgerald (above) is a Gatsby-worthy suede-and-patent combo. There's a Miller, a Wolfe, a Kerouac...you get the picture. The passion for footwear that drove Hare's blog (think Shoe-torialist) means he's designed the kind of shoes that he always wanted to find—and then had them handmade in Italy by Tuscan craftsmen. An entrepreneurial dreamer who addresses his own needs? It's a durable recipe for success. But Hare's seductive, surprising combinations of materials and textures are also likely to connect with every man's inner shoe fetishist.
Prices starting at $534; pre-ordering now at oki-ni.com; mrhare.co.uk
TIM BLANKS
Photo: Courtesy of Oki-Ni
