It has been a little while since I delved into the history of footwear and you may think that it is an odd time of year to be doing so with flip flops. Well, it was the sight of a man in short trousers and flip flops hopping through six inches of snow that inspired me.

Zori, pluggers, jandals, thongs – there really are a lot of different names for flip flops around the world. There are more names than there are designs. In essence the flip flop has not changed for thousands of years: a thin sole is held to the foot by two straps in a Y shape that join in between the two biggest toes on the foot.

It is a simple design and a classic one. While I don’t favour them myself, the familiar sound of hundreds flip flops fills many a shopping centre in the summer months.

The oldest evidence of flip flops can be found on ancient Egyptian tombs from around 4000 BC. These would have been made of papyrus and palm leaves, much like the oldest surviving examples from 1500 BC that are on display in the British Museum.

There are examples of flip flops in other early cultures such as the Masai in Africa and in Greece, Mexico, China, India and Japan. It is the last of these that holds the most importance to their enduring modern appeal.

Japanese zori date from at least the Heian period (794-1185) and following World War II, soldiers from the United States and New Zealand took the woven soled items back home.

The popularisation of flip flops wasn’t complete until cheap rubber and plastic versions flooded the market. Morris Yock of Auckland patented just such a design in 1957. Cue flip flop uproar. Englishman John Cowie started a plastics business in Hong Kong straight after the war and his children have claimed that he started making plastic Japanese Sandals (or jandals) in the late 1940s.

There is also a claim that Yock merely imported Cowie’s footwear. Alas, the issue remains unresolved. Who knew flip flops could court such controversy?

The status of flip flops in the United States was secured after the Korean War when servicemen once again took them home as souvenirs. But this time, they were plastic. It was perfect – pop culture exploded at the same time and flip flops could be produced in any colour. Their popularity was anchored in California and, in particular, by surfers.

It was probably the variety of colours in contrast to black formal wear that sparked the change. Fifty years later and I don’t care if I’m square. I think flip flops are hard to walk in, uncomfortable and ugly. They also cause blisters in between your toes. Give me some black brogues any day; I don’t care if I look silly on the beach.

I was introduced to a relatively new brand recently called Thomas Lyte. Better known for their silver work (it’s their responsibility to maintain and refurbish the FA Cup), they also have a growing selection of leather goods with an admirable focus on craft.

I visited the leather workshop in south-west London last week to take a look at how the bags are put together.

The leather they use comes from a small German tannery called Breuninger, which Thomas Lyte effectively saved from insolvency when it bought a large order of mustard-coloured grain leather a few years ago. Now functioning and solvent, Breuninger has retained the mustard dye (together with a grey) exclusively for Thomas Lyte.

The vegetable-tanned leather uses a method called tipping to bring out the fine grain the company has stamped on it. Essentially this means dying the leather twice, once before and once after stamping, the second time using a darker dye that sits between the raised grain and adds contrast.

Having written before, in my piece on Bown bags, about the hand-inking of cut edges, I was glad to see that Thomas Lyte also uses this method. They try to avoid cut edges wherever possible though. (A cut edge being where the leather has been cut, leaving a raw surface that needs to be covered with something, like ink or paste.)

On a bag’s handles a cut edge is pretty much unavoidable. But on side panels or other parts of the bag, the edges are always turned – which requires skiving the edge to make it thinner, turning it over and then stitching it down. This leaves a cleaner, smarter finish but takes longer.

Thomas Lyte’s leather products are always fully lined, with silk. This can create engineering problems, such as a tight corner where the silk has to be sewn into it on the inside. But it is more attractive, particularly in the flower motif printed on deep pink that they often use.

Also – and I love this fact – all the pockets of all the wallets are lined with silk too. Many manufacturers don’t line the pockets, only do so halfway, or use less expensive material. Because you can’t see it very easily. I check that every time I pick up a wallet now.

To segue from craft into design, I’m a fan of their coin purses that fasten with magnets along the edge. Not only do they keep the pocket shut, but when it is open they cling to the coppers so everything else comes out first. Assuming you’re not searching for 2p to put in a tip jar, this saves much scrabbling around.

Design is all about British icons. From the pillar box, Thomas Lyte’s designers took the kicking plate that runs around the bottom and transferred it to the leather goods. So the bottom section of the bags and the wallets is in black bridle leather, contrasting with the grain calf leather on top. Practical for the bags, as bridle leather is much hardier, but more a question of continuity on the wallets.

From the Spitfire plane, the designers took the curve of the tail and echoed it in everything from bottoms of the bags to the tags on all their zips (see picture). And lastly, there is a faint reminder of a fairground’s helter skelter in the lines of the pockets of a wallet.

I think Thomas Lyte is a craft-orientated company that is just discovering what it wants to do in leather goods, with a leaning towards the slightly funkier, irreverent end of the design spectrum. For the moment they are only online. But watch this space.

Photography by Andy Barnham

I recently commissioned my third single-breasted suit from my tailor*. At this stage my pattern for a single-breasted jacket is pretty much cemented. The balance works well, the sleeves have been adjusted to just the right length and small issues like the height of the waist button have been ironed out.

So it makes sense to speed the process up. At the moment I effectively have three fittings: basted, forward and final. As I always end up having something small changed when the suit is completed (such as the sleeve length or trouser waist) the final appointment is effectively a fitting.

The choice is basically to skip either the basted or forward fitting. If I skipped the basted, the cutter could send the cloth to the jacket-maker immediately, without having to wait for me to come in for a fitting. It would also save the time it takes for the jacket to be basted (say half a day).

If I skipped the forward fitting, the jacket maker would not have to send back his work at all, so the time saved would be slightly greater: no time waiting for me plus no lost time in couriering the jacket (twice).

Really though, the choice comes down to whether I am more confident in the fit of my jackets or in their design. The basted fitting is mostly about balance – it is the tailor’s biggest opportunity to get the figuration right and re-cut the cloth if anything is wrong. The forward fitting helps in this too, but it is mostly about me seeing the design in its near-finished form. It is not too late to alter the button positions or the roll of the lapel, or to spot any mistakes.

I’m not bad at designing suits, but my tailor is a lot better at fitting them. I’ve designed a dozen or so, he’s cut hundreds. So I plan to skip the basted fitting from now on. The jacket maker won’t like it, as he’ll have to pause in his work halfway, but better that than a botched design.

* A three-button, single-breasted model with patch pockets, turn-back cuffs and a collar tab; in mid-grey, nine-ounce Minnis flannel. The patch pockets have an outside welt that matches the depth of the cuffs and of the welt on the breast pocket (non-patch). Buttons will be whisky-coloured horn.

Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t know anything about women’s wear. Nothing, nada, zip. But I am interested in the crossover between menswear and more classic women’s wear.

The older the woman and the more classic her taste, the more her coats, jackets and shirts are influenced by menswear. Both are dependent on detail. The styles have to be classic so the focus is on material, shape and little touches of personality.

Lalage Beaumont is a case in point. The key features of her pieces are always cloth, buttons and cuffs. Strong colours are kept in order by complex tweeds and textured silks. The back of her jackets and coats are rarely plain – whether it be a full belt or a decorative string of white rope. Buttons are handmade and unique.

It’s like menswear taken to an ornamental, colourful extreme. Where a man’s tweed experiments with tiny, subtle touches that get lost in the whole, these women’s versions weave in ribbon and frayed ends. The green tweed shown here, from Clarenson in France, includes in its materials cotton, viscose, silk, polyester, polyamide and polyurethane. It’s a little bit more exotic that plain wool.

The yellow tweed (top) is closer to a man’s jacket – from Lynton Tweeds in Carlisle. In a mossy green it wouldn’t look out of place on Savile Row. But woven in there are similar variations in material and texture, bringing a level of decorousness that is central to women’s wear.

I was interested in the silk dresses and jackets too, the purple ones pictured here being from Lalage’s Spring/Summer 10 collection. She points out that the texture of the silk enables her to use very bright colour – the ribs and grain of the weave ground the colour in the same way as the tweed.

You can also see the flip-back collar, split cuffs and woven buttons. The parallels with menswear are obvious. Paul Smith used similar cuffs on his suits last season. And something in me wants buttons like that on a blazer.

This isn’t really surprising given that Lalage spent most of her career designing both men’s and women’s wear. Her first role was at Aquascutum. They sponsored her last collection at college and, when she left, offered her a design position. After quitting briefly, and spending that time teaching as well as freelancing at Burberrry, she returned to Aquascutum as chief outerwear designer.

That was being thrown in the deep end, but she learnt a lot about the commercial and international side of the business. Like what other countries think is English – for Germans its loud checks, for the Italians it’s far more conservative. “All the Italian women would want was a two or three-button jacket, with slanting pockets and vents. A hacking jacket, basically. You could vary the cloth, but that was about,” remembers Lalage.

Ten years at Chester Barrie followed, launching women’s wholesale and bringing a lot of men’s construction techniques – such as canvassing and cut – to that range. Again the ‘county’ look was what European women wanted and that was when Lalage developed her interest in men’s details: turn-back cuffs, Prussian collars and Great coat-like belts.

She was head of ready-to-wear at Mulberry for two years, both men’s and women’s, before working in New Zealand as a merchandiser. Then five years ago she launched her own label, now based on Avery Row just off Bond Street.

Don’t worry, I don’t foresee many other pieces on women’s wear. But it’s interesting to explore the influences of our subject.

Photography: Andy Barnham

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.

Martin Brighty and David Walker have been around the tie industry for a long time. They first met at legendary English tie-maker Holliday & Brown 20 years ago, brought in to replace the sales director and admin director at the time. Indeed the famous ‘Buster’ Brown first taught Martin how to make ties.

But a few years after they joined, Holliday & Brown was bought by Michelson’s. And four years after that, both were made redundant (this was the early nineties).

That spurred them to start the brand Hunter’s, which has been quietly making handmade English ties for most of the high-end fashion labels, Savile Row tailors and Jermyn Street shirtmakers ever since. It’s probably fair to say they are one of the two last bastions of traditional English tie-making – the other being Drake’s.

Many of Holliday & Brown’s customers followed Martin and David, but “you never know whether the people that said they would buy from you actually will. And even if they do, you don’t know if they will the second season,” remembers David.

The US had been a big client of Holliday & Brown, so the two of them flew over to drum up support early on – having put together a collection of blankets with the help of Vanners – and used the resulting orders to get a bank loan. Production was done by around a dozen hand tie-makers that they knew in the UK, some of whom also worked for Holliday. “And a few of those girls are still alive today and making for us,” says David.

There aren’t many of these at-home tie makers any more. Drake’s has its own factory. But traditionally ties were made by outworkers that had several clients and got paid per item. Weaving, equally, used to be a cottage industry until it was centralised by factories like Vanners.

Martin and David had a small crisis three years ago when the one woman that made all their silk scarves retired. She had several people working for her, usually for three or four months of the year (scarf-making being seasonal work). But the workers got tired of the seasonality and either went to work in Tesco or returned home to Italy.

Eventually they found a girl and her family in Oldham, who now make all the scarves. The tough thing with silk scarves is the fringing – holding many different coloured threads, bunching them together and knotting them effectively. Some that Martin and David trialled previously either used the wrong fringing thread or made knots that gradually loosened.
She used to work for a hand-roll hemmer (hand rolling handkerchiefs, headscarves etc.) and took over that small business when he retired. So it all gets passed on, in bits and pieces. Until someone goes to work in Tesco.

The other half of David and Martin’s operation, of course, is Peckham Rye. Now well-known for its skinny ties and silk scarves, the brand was so successful in wholesale that customers kept asking where the Peckham Rye shop was. Initially they were in Harley Street, then Covent Garden, and now in Newburgh Street (just off Carnaby St) since July last year. It finally feels like a space that suits them – cosy, quirky and decorated with Private Eye covers. As hopefully these pictures demonstrate.

Photography: Andy Barnham