One of my friends has a theory that it is the bottom of a well made men’s shoe that shows the quality of the purchase. He believes that the detail on the waist and the fully leather sole reveals more to the average eye than the finely buffed uppers.

As a result, he likes to sit with his legs crossed and one sole showing whenever he can. This has the added benefit of revealing that he has thought about the colour of his socks too. He tends to do this more around female company too, but I’m not sure his results are quantifiable.

I find the whole thing a bit ridiculous. I am not self conscious enough to change the way I sit just to show off the bottom of my shoes in the hope that someone will notice them. Plus, I’ve always found that people notice good shoes from the uppers if they are polished well.

But the beggar got me thinking about the soles of my shoes. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be changing my gait to avoid marking my soles at all. However, I am getting a little obsessed about the waist of my shoes (the bit that angles down from the top of the heel stack to the point where the sole begins to touch the floor).

My friend advised me to clean the waist and even to polish it every so often. On a few pairs of my shoes, there is an interesting design element on the waist. Be that a different colour of leather or hand bunking by a fancy wheel. So I could see a benefit to the twisted logic of polishing the underside of a pair of shoes.

But this advice has helped speed up my rapid descent into obsessive polishing. It has also changed the way that I walk up and down stairs. I am worried about scuffing the waist, so I end up trying to place my whole foot on a step or just enough of the toe and ball of my foot to avoid the waist.

As a result, I look like I have never encountered a staircase before. My friend’s obsession with the soles of his shoes is designed to attract conversation. My manifestation of the obsession means that people avoid me because I look mentally ill when I enter a subway station.

My recent theory that the shape of a pair of my shoes was the cause of pain got me thinking about the impact of footwear on the body.

Something that I haven’t really considered is the arches in my feet. I knew that fallen arches can be a barrier to getting into the armed forces, but that was about it.

However, one of the most common causes of gait problems is the presence of pes planus – commonly known as flat feet. This problem is caused by the collapse of the medial longitudinal arch on the inside of the foot.

For such a small part of the anatomy, fallen arches have a large effect on your lower body over the years. Once they fall, the way that your foot is positioned changes and your weight pushes on the wrong side. The interconnectivity of the bones in the leg passes the problem up to the knee joint. (The foot bone connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the knee bone and all that…

This can develop into genu valgum or ‘knock knees’. Your weight has rolled from the outside of your feet and legs to the inside. The outside of your knee is stretched (including the medial collateral ligament) and the cartilage on the inside of your knee (the medial meniscus) is subject to more pressure from the leg bones.

Essentially, the cartilage is at a higher risk of being ground down. And cartilage doesn’t regenerate – once it is gone, it is gone. This is because blood supply to the cartilage is non-existent. So fallen arches leave you more prone to arthritis in your knees. The angle of your hip joint is under similarly abnormal strains.

Scary stuff. But what do physiotherapists believe can aid this? Considering the nature of this column, it is entirely predictable: correctly supporting footwear.

In addition, prevention is the best cure. The first thing to do is to check your arches. The best way to do this is to stand on a towel when you get out of the shower. The wet footprint should be thinner in the middle and on the outside – the side that is anatomically designed for bearing weight.

Hopefully, your footprint will be the correct shape. But if it is, don’t assume that you don’t have to do anything. You may have strong arches now, but all muscles deteriorate over time. Therefore getting into a good habit before there is a problem is still important. So make sure that your footwear has the correct support. Not just when you are doing high impact sports, but in your day-to-day wear. It is worth the extra money and it is easy to check with the assistant during the sales process.

If your footprint doesn’t have a distinctive thin part, then your arches have fallen or are falling. Do not panic! I’d always assumed that once your arches had gone, they couldn’t be recovered. But my research has proved me wrong. Like any muscles, those responsible for the arches can be exercised and strengthened. Watch this space for tips soon.

SATRA is the world’s leading research and technology authority on international legislation testing, and the technical aspects of footwear.

Its test methods and accreditation systems are unrivalled. Its UK headquarters house a chemical analysis laboratory where, amongst other footwear components, it regularly tests the performance of different leather soles. I have been delving through their detailed analysis of chestnut bark vs. oak bark-tanned leather for soling, and will relay details of their official findings in the second part of this post.

Here though, I am reporting on some in-house sole testing. As mentioned in a previous post, I had a pair of Lodgers made up with chestnut soles and have been rigorously wear-testing and comparing them to a pair made up with our oak-bark sole.

Comparing the finished soles, the colouration is very similar, with both soles absorbing sole stain equally.

Our factory reported that the chestnut leather was more supple and easier to work with. The crispness of the sole bunking is also slightly better with chestnut.

In wear, the oak deteriorated quicker that its rival; and when worn in rain, both resisted water uptake equally but the oak took longer to dry. The oak bark-tanned sole showed signs of slight water staining in the toe area, but both were left almost identical in colour.

Comfort-wise, again the results were almost equal. As the chestnut leather has more immediate ‘flex’ it feels better when first worn each day. The oak took a little longer (two wears) to break in at the flex point and after sustained wear it left the feet slightly more fatigued.

To me, the winner at this point is the chestnut. It is favoured by those in the factory making the shoes, and the greater flexibility is a great advantage.

The SATRA results indicate how the two soles react under extreme analysis: heat resistance, extreme exposure to water and abrasion. In my next post I will compare our findings with the SATRA results and determine the winner; and future Lodger sole material of choice.

I have been investigating soling options recently. I’ve always been told that the finest quality leather outsoles should be ‘oak bark tanned.’ A little investigation into this claim has uncovered some interesting facts – it’s not that clear-cut and there’s an argument that chestnut is probably better.

The ancient system required for converting hide into leather, tanning, is remarkably lengthy when vegetable tanning (using natural compounds) is employed. Vegetable tanning creates a much firmer, tougher leather than synthetic (chrome) tanning so it is favoured for creating soling material.

The first step requires the cattle hides to be softened for a day in vast drums filled with a lime solution. This cleans the hides of debris, dirt and natural salts and thoroughly hydrates the skin layers.

Next the flesh is removed from the clean, softened hides revealing the real quality of the skin. At this point the 5-8mm thick hides are meticulously graded. If the skins show no imperfections they will then be suspended and steeped for six weeks in a tanning pit. It is important at this stage that the hides are not moved, as this motion would alter the collagen balance and soften the skin structure, leaving the hides less able to cope with the wear and tear demanded of a soling material.

A second six-week soak follows the first; this time in a stronger solution, before the hides are removed and placed into their final pit where they are again steeped, this time for up to 11 months.

The solution (liquor) in which the hides are soaked or ‘tanned’ is a concoction of assorted natural ingredients. Their tannins bond readily with the collagen in skin to lend the leather durability and increased resistance to water and high temperatures.

Tannin is an astringent (meaning it tightens pores). Typical materials used for tanning include bark from any of the oaks, fir, certain willows, chestnut, tea, quebracho, sumac leaves, oak galls, root, birch, alder, hemlock and bearberry leaves. Heather, bloodroot, alfalfa, sweet gale, pomegranate rinds, certain fern’s rhizomes and wood-hops have also been used, mixed with animal droppings and urine. In fact, when you peruse the literature, you realise that an enormous amount of flora and fauna were at one time or another, in one country or another, important sources of tannin.

Oak bark is said to produce leather with a tighter grain, making the leather less prone to breaking. The leather also tends to be lighter in colour and more responsive to embossing and decorative staining.

Until the late 1800s however, chestnut (a member of the oak tree family) was considered the best overall type of tannin to be used on leather. The bark was imported, mostly from North America, and used throughout Europe’s finest tanneries.

The trend for oak-bark tanning took hold at the turn of the last century, and a little investigation reveals that a blight in 1904 wiped out most of America’s chestnut trees. Due to chronic raw material shortages, tanneries were forced to switch to bark from the genetically-close oak.

Today the term ‘oak bark tanned’ is applied loosely to any tannage of heavy leather with organic extracts. We use oak bark-tanned leather soles on Lodger shoes, but I was curious to discover how chestnut-tanned soles would behave. With the help of our Northampton workshop we sourced a supplier that is again using chestnut (the bark is now from France, not America) and have made up a pair of shoes with the chestnut soles to be ‘wear tested.’

The results are (so far) very interesting indeed. In construction the material is as easy to work with as oak. The light colour of the leather is very similar and holds stain and dye identically. The wear of the sole, however, will be the deciding factor – so I am eager to hear how our test pair fares. I shall keep you updated…