The odds of seeing a pair of Dr. Martens being worn on any street in the world in the age of sneakerdom is still pretty high. You might’ve seen them being worn by kids with spiked haircuts and colourful, if not outlandish clothes. The shoe has been picked up by 4 generations and has become an icon in its own right. For the uninitiated, Dr. Martens has been manufacturing work shoes with air-filled soles since 1960, long before Nike high jacked the concept. And like all great ideas, the air-filled sole was borne out of practicality.
The time was post-War Munich, 1945, and Dr. Klaus Martens was a 25 year old soldier with a broken foot, a result of a bad skiing fall in the Bavarian Alps during a spell of leave in combat. It was during his recovery that he thought of a possible remedy for his injury – a sole made up of some type of air-filled material rather than the conventional, harder leather. The war having just ended, people were looting left and right for valuable stuff like jewels and fur, but Klaus Martens had other ideas. He started looking for leather, needles and threads and made himself a pair of shoes with the thick air-filled soles he was thinking about.
Out of this adverse situation was thus the first Dr. Martens prototype boot was born. Although crudely handmade, he set out to Munich wearing the boots to generate interest in his invention. He met an old college friend, Dr. Herbert Funck, a mechanical engineer who was fascinated with his friend’s peculiar shoes. After a brief talk, Dr. Funck quickly bought up tons of rubber from abandoned Luftwaffe airfields at rock bottom prices and began turning them into soles. Initially launched in the U.K. as cheap footwear for workers, it wasn’t long before the general population, namely the youth, began noticing this practical yet revolutionary shoe.
The first youth group to notice its potential are what is now known to be skinheads. Skinheads are a break-away group from the trendy Mod scene in the U.K. Shunning the long-haired, dead-beat hippie aesthetic and abandoning the more flamboyant tendencies of the Mods, skinheads cut their hair real short as an anti-fashion statement, and took to wearing boots and jeans to complete the working class look, as opposed to the Italian suits preferred by the Mods.
The next group to annex the DMs boot were what generally became known as punks. Unlike the skins before them, punks tended to be more colourful in their choice of street-wear, taking from other youth cultures and turning the original on its head. Individuality was its call to arms, and self expression was at a premium. Although the boots were not a required staple among punks, prominent punk rockers The Clash wore them often at gigs.
Not long after punk, a couple of groups started mixing Jamaican Ska with Punk, preferring the low-cut DMs to the boots. The scene, which gravitated around the music label 2 Tone, proved to be short-lived as its predecessors.
Fast forward to the 90s and once again the DMs shoe was again on the spotlight. This time though, it was in Seattle, US.A. that the boot would experience a renaissance; a renaissance where even women started wearing the boots with dresses. Not bad for a shoe that an ex-soldier came up with to alleviate the pain on his broken foot.
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