How to properly care for leather shoe soles. Luxury shoes with leather soles Non-leather shoes with studded soles

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Shoe care

Stand with both feet on two sheets of paper. Holding the pencil strictly vertically, draw a line around the leg...

How to preserve leather soles?

Classic Loake boots and shoes are usually made from calf leather— completely, including the sole. And so, having received a pair of such shoes on our hands (or, more accurately, on our feet), we first become delighted with the fact that we have joined the British traditions, and then we think about how to behave with leather soles. How will it behave in our weather and road conditions and how to protect it from wear and tear?

House shoes?

Indeed, shoes with leather soles, like the various variations of Loake Aldwych, will not be happy with constant street wear. And then you won’t be happy either: worn out and deformed places, bends, abrasions...

Some people claim that these boots can only be worn indoors and nothing else. And under no circumstances any Russian asphalt! Others say that in dry summer weather they only walk on leather soles, and everything is fine. Although, of course, the scale of walking is different for everyone, and the weather sometimes changes as if by magic.

What happens to leather soles? At the slightest contact with water, it softens, and having absorbed moisture, it is immediately erased. The sole takes a very long time to dry, and when dry it can be easily wiped off.

If you are concerned about the condition of your shoes and at the same time want to be able to wear them anywhere and everywhere, and not just indoors, there is an excellent solution - to put so-called prevention on the soles.

For prevention

Prevention or roll-ons on shoes- this is a special thick sticker that is attached to the sole of a shoe and protects it from abrasion. It is made of regular, microporous and dense rubber. They install rollers in all shoe workshops, very quickly and inexpensively - about 300-400 rubles.

First, the factory coating is removed from the sole, because the glue will not adhere to it. Then heated glue is applied to the knurls and the sole, the sticker is carefully leveled on the shoe and glued. To ensure reliability, go over the sole with a hammer, and carefully cut off the excess rubber. The whole process takes ten to fifteen minutes. Once the glue has cooled, you can put on your boots - they are ready.

Previously, the rolls were quite thick and spoiled appearance shoes, but now there is no need to worry about this - stickers are available from 0.8 millimeters in thickness. They are made different colors, most often it is black, white, brown or beige.

There is an opinion that it is better to put preventive maintenance on shoes after they have been worn several times - they say, the soles are a little worn out. And in general, sticking something on the fresh leather sole of new shoes is blasphemy. But experts advise preventing the “disease”, and not treating its consequences, and setting pressure on new shoes At once. However, after the third or fourth wear they install just as easily, so it’s up to you to choose.

From time to time there are opinions that roll-ups prevent the foot from breathing in shoes - but still, such complaints are few in number and purely individual. Moreover, you can order rolls only on certain areas of the sole, and not as a continuous sheet. A thin rubber sticker will help preserve the sole and significantly extend the life of your shoes, and at the same time reduce the risk of slipping.

After the assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov in Ankara - or more precisely, after the photograph of Burhan Ozbilici received the main prize of World Press Photo 2017 - my favorite photographer Sergei Maximishin wrote on his Facebook :

More about the photo of the year. Worn down shoes are the main thing there. The terrorist triumphs: he shot at the function and killed the function. But we see what the criminal does not see: a person has been killed. A man in worn-out shoes.

Here Sergei Yakovlevich repeats the mistake of any person who prefers to get acquainted with shoes with leather soles from photographs. What he calls "worn shoes" and what makes his heart ache is the normal condition of leather soles. If you buy a new pair of shoes with leather soles and walk around town in them three or four times, the soles will look exactly the same. And this will not at all prevent them from delighting you for the next few years and from time to time arousing the compassion of photographers to whom you will show your soles.

In Britain, boots with Goodyear welt construction have potentially several lives. Almost all manufacturers offer a refurbishment procedure: you send worn-out shoes to the factory where they were made; there the sole is completely replaced with a new one, the top of the shoe is also brought into some semblance of order, and you get practically new shoes that do not need to be broken in. This procedure usually costs from 80 to 150 British pounds excluding postage: accordingly, it makes sense if your pair cost 400 feet; if the boots cost £150, it would be cheaper to throw them away and buy a new pair. The sole is changed up to three times - so sometimes the shoes live quietly for 20 years.

Here, for example, is the cost of repairs at the Grenson factory:

The speed at which leather soles are worn depends not so much on the quality and finish of the leather, but on the gait characteristics of a particular person. If you live far from Northampton, where the production of normal English boots has historically been concentrated, the problem of a leather sole that wears out too quickly is solved in a simple and inexpensive way: in any shoe workshop they know how to glue an outsole to a leather sole (in Moscow this is called “prevention”, in St. Petersburg they say "roll") made of reinforced rubber. Whether or not to put soles on leather soles is mostly a religious question: opponents say that the feet stop breathing, and irreparable damage is caused to the structure of the shoe; proponents point out that it's better to breathe through your nose and mouth rather than your soles, and that spending $20 on an outsole is several times better than spending £200 on a complete overhaul of a pair.

After the shooting of former Russian Duma deputy Denis Voronenkov in Kyiv at the entrance to the Premier Palace, we again got photographs of a corpse wearing boots with leather soles.

What’s interesting: Voronenkov has expensive shoes on his feet (that is, costing somewhere from five hundred pounds sterling versus the usual 200-300) and, in a sense, “show-off” shoes. The leather sole tells us this. Pay attention to its design: usually on Goodyear welt boots, the upper of the shoe, welt and leather sole are stitched in such a way that on the bottom of the sole along its circumference a groove with stitching threads is clearly visible: this is called open channel sole stitching - “sole with open stitching” ", to put it quite roughly. On the feet of the late Voronenkov there is an example of “closed channel sole stitching”, when the sole along with the grooves is covered with an additional decorative layer of leather. This is done to kill two birds with one stone: firstly, it’s beautiful; secondly, boots from the upper price category must differ at least in some way from their cheaper counterparts. There is no functional sense in closed stitching: when you walk around the city in new shoes several times, the decorative layer of leather will wear out and the groove with threads will be exposed (which, again, is clearly visible in the picture).

What open and closed seams on the soles look like:

Finally, some companies (for example, Church's) fundamentally do not make (or tried to make, and then stopped) shoes with closed leather soles. One of the reasons voiced on the Northampton shoemakers forum sounds funny: “we stopped doing that because the number of stupid assholes among customers went off scale: they bought boots, and when a thin layer of leather rubbed and a groove with a seam was exposed, they took it for a defect and returned to the store to cause a scandal and replace the pair."

What conclusions can be drawn from this?

1. People who are shot for completely different reasons often prefer shoes with leather soles.

2. The late Voronenkov paid at least twice as much for his boots as the late Karlov.

3. If you are concerned about how you will look in the eyes of the builders after meeting with the killer, make sure to buy at least one pair of decent boots in advance.

• Shoes with leather soles are pleasant to wear and comfortable for the feet, as they allow air to pass through, “as they say, feet breathe,” and also make it possible not to retain moisture in the shoes, since feet can sweat when walking.
• At the same time, when walking on a wet road, the leather sole absorbs moisture, which is harmful for this type of sole and leads to damage, more on that later
• When walking on particularly rough surfaces such as asphalt, concrete, leather soles wear out quite quickly.

So, we see that the advantages of shoes with leather soles are quite significant, but if you do not take into account the disadvantages, then after some time after purchase you can be very upset that your expensive and beloved shoes will become unusable.

From the above, you can see that there are two main enemies for such shoes: moisture and bad roads.

What to do to protect leather soles from rapid deterioration?

1 The first advice: do not walk on bad and wet roads, but only on carpets, parquet or tiles.
It’s true that this is not always possible.

2 Then the second and most optimal advice will suit you: after purchasing the shoes, take care to install the outsole on the sole. You may also hear another name for such repairs – prevention or roll-up.

These are rubber soles that a shoe repair shop will glue onto your soles.

Interestingly, some stores even sell shoes that have leather soles and branded soles for them, taking into account that if the buyer wants to install them over time, he can do this in the workshop and with his own soles.

Or you can do it yourself, but of course this requires certain knowledge and skills. (Who is interested in watching mastery lessons)

Of course, it should be taken into account that not all shoe repair specialists will be able to beautifully and efficiently install preventive maintenance, so if you have expensive shoes, then try to find a workshop where they do high-quality repairs and where they can take into account your wishes.

For example, owners of expensive shoes often ask me that prevention be installed not just as standard, but in some unusual way, so as not to be conspicuous.

There are different options, for example, I recently installed an outsole where the base of the edge is not flat, but arched. Looks good.

Of course, in order to install the outsole beautifully, and even on a leather sole, you need to take into account some nuances that not everyone knows about, but I talk about them in my master class, which can be found on the page

Products for protecting leather soles are professional products that prevent cracking and damage to leather shoes due to constant contact with moisture and various chemicals. You can purchase these products from well-known manufacturers on the “Magic Shoe Shoe” website.

What do we offer?

On sale are tonics based on special resins that impregnate the material and make it stronger, and also prevent the effect of moisture on the product. You can purchase compact stick pencils made from synthetic wax. Such products create a durable protective film on the sole, preventing deformation and damage to the material.

The store also has standard impregnations in cans (Ouraline SAPHIR), which are also suitable for sports and hiking shoes. This impregnation contains animal fats and vegetable oil, which soften the skin and reliably protect it from dampness.

Why us?

Why is it recommended to purchase products for protecting leather soles on shoes at the Magic Shoe Shoe store? Here are some reasons:

• We sell high-quality and certified products that are guaranteed to extend the life of leather shoes.
• You can purchase these products at an affordable price.
• We have products in various forms of release.
• Fast and inexpensive delivery is another advantage of our online store.