From Russia (and Cleverley) With Love
One of the things that makes high-quality artisan goods so exciting is the stories they carry with them. And boy do these carry a story. They might even be more Indiana Jones than the Indy Boot…
In the winter of 1786, yes seventeen eighty-six, a Danish ship called the Metta Catharina sank in the icy waters of Plymouth Sound. The winds ripped it right off it’s anchor and while the crew mostly made it to shore ok the ship was completely lost. Not a bad story to begin with, but the cargo of Russian Reindeer leather onboard makes things a little more interesting.
The Russians, due to the different natural materials available, had a very different method of tanning from the British or Italians. Willow and birch replace oak, and when combined with reindeer hide you get an extremely resilient result. So when some British amateur divers found the wreck almost two-hundred years later in 1973, they were able to scrape the tar-like mud off the wrapped hides and found leather unlike anything made today.
The color is a rich reddish-brown and there is a pronounced grain structure somewhere between scotch-grain and rough-goat. A few companies have produced bags and wallets from the limited supply, but only GJ Cleverley of London’s Royal Arcade crafts it into bespoke shoes.
New York tailor Leonard Logsdail happens to have a pair and was sporting them when I dropped in for a visit this week. Personally I think the galosh style oxford suits the leather perfectly and lets the material do most of the talking. As if a few hundred years on the bottom of the ocean wasn’t enough, Len’s been beating these shoes up for decades and just recently had them resoled and tuned up.
In addition to the natural grain, the leather has formed hairline surface cracks that add to the antique effect but don’t hurt the integrity of the hide at all. The color is far richer than I could get to come up in these impromptu (and sort of blurry) photos. Suffice it to say you have to see it to believe it, however trite that sounds. Only time will tell, but with any luck the Logsdail gents might just give these puppies another 200 years of patina…
