FOOTWEAR FOCUS ROAD TEST - ANATOMIC & CO. - ARARAS
W Something in the City
ere you a little older than you are now, and you had lived in central London when you were young, you would be familiar with the species, otherwise known as ‘Something in the City’. However, today it's all but died out, or should I say, in the great scheme of
things, that it has evolved? What did for the species it is difficult to say. If you were to inquire of the
late Charles Darwin he'd tell that a species that is unable to adapt would die out. It happened to the dinosaurs, the mammoths and sabre-tooth tiger and, of late, it happened to the British motorcar industry and the television show Big Brother. They died out because they could not live in the modern world. There was a time the species flourished. In leafy Surrey suburbs at a time when ladies who lunch actually had coffee mornings and, yes, lunched and they would ask each other what their husbands did. And with a dismissive wave of the hand and a bob of the head (that their husbands had told them not to trouble) they would say, "Oh! He's something in the City." It was not just to the ladies who lunched that the husbands’ missions in
life were a mystery. They were to the nation, indeed to the whole world. All that was known of the species was that it dressed each day in
capacious boxer shorts, which were made from sufficient material to sail a tea cutter in the doldrums. They then donned a singlet, a dark suit, a white shirt with a detachable, starched collar held in place with a stud, a tie (for many it was the regimental or, even more pertinent, the old school tie), smart black shoes and a bowler hat. It was not unknown for them to wear suspenders. I hasten to add these
were not cross-dressing accessories, a chap left those tendencies behind him when he ceased to be a fag at his public school. No, no these were manly devices from which a chap’s socks were suspended as he strode to ‘Suburbiton’ station with his umbrella tightly rolled to board the seven thirty three British Rail Southern Region train to London Bridge and beyond…to The City. So little has survived. The breezy boxers have been shunned in
favour of form hugging Calvin Kleins. The old school tie gave way to loud, red braces, the sombre suit to the loud pin stripe. And the white shirt was replaced by something that looks like the material used for deckchairs on Blackpool beach. One no longer “got ahead” if you wore a bowler hat, indeed any hat at all. And the suspenders that truly gave a chap support where he needed it, were superseded by the miracle of nothing less than elasticised socks. The only one thing that was left, the only item that evidence the bygone
era, the objects that survived this sartorial holocaust, this evolutionary transmutation, this evolutionary cataclysm - and these were the shoes. Amazingly, with all other proof of that golden age when a chap was something in The City are the ever so shiny, smart, ever so comfortable black shoes. It's the survival of the fittest you see and the Araras shoe from Anatomic & Co. is the living example. In the same way as the Neanderthals copped it because their low brows could not adapt to using a knife and fork like us homo sapiens, a chap who was "something in the City" was lost to history. The only bit of him to survive was his shoes. The Araras from Anatomic & Co. is made from the softest
leather I have ever worn in a men’s city shoe. But, adding to the comfort is
Henry Harington reports on the resurgence of the shiny black shoe
the Anatomic Gel Technology rubber gel sole. And, as someone who has slightly wonky feet (I have surgical insoles or orthotics) I cannot speak too highly of the comfort this cushioned base of the shoe brings. So, in this sense, the sensible shoe worn by someone who was
something in the City survives. The City as we know it – the one that brought the UK to its financial knees - has gone but the name Araras resonates with delightful ironies. Araras is also the name of a city and municipality located in the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. On the day I wrote this piece the Brazilian government announced that their economy is now bigger than Britain’s, perhaps the final proof that the men who were once “Something in the City” didn’t do a frightfully good job.
Details:
Anatomic & Co. • Araras Black
• Trade Price £44.45 RRP £99.95 • Tel: 0203 115 0002 • Email:
info@ghetz.com
16 • FOOTWEAR TODAY
• APRIL 2012
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