The Beauty of Handmade Shoes
In 2018, we soft-launched our 1202 Heritage Collection with Hugo Jacomet of The Parisian Gentleman, a semi-bespoke line of shoes that give our customers the opportunity to experience the fit, beauty, and elegance of a fully handmade shoe, without the need to go full bespoke.
Each shoe from this special collection is hand-lasted, hand-welted and outsole stitched by hand in either our workshop in Barcelona or by our teammate Kenjiro Kawashima who is now based in Seoul, Korea after working in our Barcelona atelier for 3 years. Ken is the 3rd place winner of the 2022 Shoemaking World Championship.
The 1202 Heritage Collection derives it’s name from the date that the shoemakers guild of Barcelona was founded, which is the oldest existing shoemakers guild in the world, and a guild that Norman Vilalta and a number of our shoemakers are a part of.
We created this handmade line of shoes as both an homage to the guild and a unique opportunity for the shoe aficionado to enjoy the beauty of a fully handmade shoe by of our highly-skilled artisans.
For nearly half a decade we’ve kept this under the radar line of semi-bespoke shoes for those “in the know”. This special handmade shoe collection was offered to those who either made appointments in our workshop in Barcelona or to those who via word-of-mouth in the shoemaking community heard about the collection and reached out to us.
With a very small team of artisans here in Barcelona who juggle working on our bespoke shoes and the hand-finishing of our Condal Collection, we’ve been very specific about managing our handmade capacity properly.
For this limited online launch, we have allotted space for 6 orders and once we’ve reached this threshold we will not accept more orders until we have additional capacity.
We selected our Adelaide Full Brogue Oxford, a style that has unique design flare but fits comfortably in the classic shoe realm. We consider our Adelaide the ultimate dress shoe because it stands out strikingly among your normal cap toe oxford with flattering proportions, beautiful curves, and intricate detailing that can only be achieved by hand.
The carefully hand-sculpted shoe features an upper in supple French box calf leather from Tanneries du Puy, five eyelet lacing, our signature asymmetric pattern with no center back seam, a slender double-beveled waist that is carefully carved by hand, a pitched heel with a extremely tight seat, and a onyx patina with slight grey accents peeking out of the cap toe, heel and facings.
The Adelaide Oxford can be dressed up with any classic apparel, and some may be tempted to keep them in a glass display case.
Our fully handmade Adelaide Full Brogue Oxford is now available to order and each pair will be delivered in approximately 7 to 8 months. We will close our list once our 6 pair threshold has been reached.
