For my first solo design for Lodger, I wanted to propose a suede boot for Spring that would look great with jeans, but could easily be dressed up for a Mayfair lunch. We are accustomed to boots being around for A/W, but I think they are increasingly becoming a year-round staple.

While Lodger had previously offered a monk shoe (as the March 2009 shoe of the month) it hadn’t yet used a buckle fastening in one of its boots, and this led me directly to traditional Jodhpur patterns.

I felt the key aesthetic features of the Jodhpur boot were the shapes and contours formed by the interlocking straps and, because they are left unadorned, the shape of the toe and vamp. With this and a dressed-up look in mind, the place to start was in selecting our 12221 last for it’s elegant, gentlemanly toe.

I also wanted to honour the Lodger hallmark of tweaking the accepted order of pattern pieces (see our English Contemporary Cap Toe). In the traditional Jodhpur pattern, the vamp piece of the boot overlays the quarters and is pulled back and secured over the quarters by the straps and buckle. My original design had the vamp overlaying the quarter on the inside of the boot, but the quarter overlaying the vamp piece on the outside.

While technically possible, our pattern cutters quickly pointed out the impracticability of blocking (the technique of shaping a single piece of leather to the curve of a boot), clicking and closing an asymmetric pattern piece in production. The finished design has the quarters overlaying the vamp on both sides of the boot, a fine slip bead showing off the contours of the quarters.

Returning to the other key feature of the design, I wanted to bring the ankle straps (and the back strap) to centre stage. This meant crossing the ankle straps over at the vamp and using a calf leather to contrast with the suede.  The positioning and proportions of the straps were essential both aesthetically (to harmonise with the contours of the last and the lines of the rest of the pattern (particularly the tab where the quarters join the vamp)) and practically (they need to allow foot entry and then effectively hold the leg into the boot). On the first prototype, they leaned too much towards the practical and were too high and too narrow, so I repositioned and fluted them as below:

The back strap, again in contrast calf leather, needs to be functional in securing the ankle straps as well as aesthetically complementary in width. The stitched double arrow tabs reinforce this functional aspect while adding movement to the lines of the boot.

In keeping with the boot’s equestrian roots, I’ve chosen a palette of browns, focused around our beautiful bitter chocolate repello suede. The almond calf accentuates the lines of the straps and, with Spring in mind, lightens the overall look, a lightness carried on by the natural sole edge.

The finishing touch is the cast brass buckle, appropriately of equestrian heritage.