Chelsea boots are a classic for a reason: they never go out of fashion. Sure, designers may introduce a few unexpected twists each season, like a chunky lug sole or perhaps metallic leather, but year after year the silhouette remains a shoe essential.
The essential style actually has a long history. Defined by their low heel, ankle height and pull-on loops, Chelsea boots have been around since the Victorian era; The first pair was actually designed in 1837 by Queen Victoria’s shoemaker, Joseph Sparkes Hall, himself. It has an elastic insert and a comfortable flat sole. According to Halls, the Queen loved them so much that she “walked in them every day.”
The mod, mod history of Chelsea boots
By the 1960s, other influential Britons had become champions of the style. Nowhere was this more evident than in London’s hip Chelsea neighbourhood, where everyone from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones to Jean Shrimpton wore them with modern skinny trousers and floppy hair.
These newfangled Chelsea boots, with a low, Cuban-inspired heel and a sleek, almond-shaped toe, are custom made by dance shoemakers Anello & Davide at the request of The Beatles; Eventually they would become known as Beatle boots. They were considered incredibly seminal at the time: in 1980, Andy Warhol remembered he was impressed when he saw David Bailey and Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones wearing the boots to a dinner in London twenty years earlier. “They all had a distinctive way of dressing… it was the way he put things together that was so amazing: this pair of shoes with those trousers that no one else would have thought to wear. And of course, Bailey and Mick both wore boots from Anello & Davide, the dancing shoemaker in London,” Warhol mused.
More recently, designers like Proenza Schouler, Prada and Valentino sent their own distinctive versions of Chelsea boots to the fall 2024 runways. The style’s unflinching popularity – as Queen Victoria rightly noted a century ago – comes down to its practicality. That, and the fact that they are also wonderfully unisex; Both men and women can pull this off, as the aforementioned icons of the Swinging Sixties – and lately Timothée Chalamet – have proven.