New York Times - December 3, 2007
An Antifashion Classic Returns
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
WITH their chunky rubber soles and sturdy leather uppers, Dr. Martens are just the thing to be wearing if you happen to step in something unpleasant, which is exactly what the company itself did this spring.
After Dr. Martens ran advertisements that depicted dead rock stars like
Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Joe Strummer of the Clash wearing its shoes in heaven, the musicians’ survivors (who had not granted permission) and fans were outraged. The outcry was so great that the British company that makes the shoes, AirWair International, issued an apology and fired its advertising agency, the London office of Saatchi & Saatchi, part of the
Publicis Groupe.
But now the brand has a new campaign, a new agency and fresh ambitions for a comeback.
The campaign, by Exposure Communications of London, features young models wearing Docs with grunge- and punk-inflected outfits and expressions of bored disaffection; the spots are appearing in the United States, Britain, France and Germany in publications like Teen Vogue, Spin and British GQ.
The shoes have also stomped into numerous magazine editorial features and fashion spreads, appearing recently in GQ, Vogue, Seventeen, Lucky and Us Weekly (which declared, “They’re baack!”)
Dr. Martens showed up at New York’s fall Fashion Week in collections by
Yohji Yamamoto, who is collaborating with the brand to create a limited-edition line, and by Chloé, which paired chunky boots incongruously with willowy dresses.
“They are kind of antifashion fashion,” said Kimberly Barta, vice president for marketing at AirWair International’s American operation in Portland, Ore. “We were a practical, hard-wearing, all-purpose work boot before we were ever picked up by the youth culture, and in time we became a design classic.”
Now Ms. Barta is trying to replicate deliberately what first happened serendipitously. The company used to be able to rely on rock bands finding their way to the shoes, but now it is making sure the shoes find them: pairs of Dr. Martens are provided gratis to popular and up-and-coming musicians, including Avril Lavigne, Gallows and the Misshapes, Ms. Barta said.
Today there are about 450 styles, compared with just a few originally. And while the shoes once had to be sought out in “those nipple-ring and nose-ring stores that brought the brand to prominence,” Ms. Barta said, today they are available at major retailers and at online shoe stores like Zappos.
A clunky work boot first made in 1960 for British mail carriers and factory workers, Dr. Martens spontaneously and inexplicably grew popular with skinheads, punks and other antiestablishment types. The brand remained fairly chic from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, when it lost traction to other shoes and sneakers.
Revenue at AirWair International, a privately held company, has dropped precipitously, to $127 million in 2006, from $412 million in 1999, according to Hoover’s Online, a business research site.
Like any older brand sniffing the smelling salts, Doc Martens has Internet initiatives, too. It recently started a contest where people can custom-design the classic 1460 boot online (
www.dmbootdesign.com). Participants start with a blank boot, then choose colors for the leather and laces. From there they can use virtual equivalents of the tools that fans have historically used to personalize their boots: felt-tip markers, Wite-Out, spray paint and even a lighter to discolor the leather. Since the site began in October, more than 11,000 designs have been submitted.
Visitors vote for their favorites, and over the next year, the four most popular designs will be produced in limited editions of 1,000 boots that will be sold primarily at the brand’s flagship stores in London and Portland.
“That feature on the Web site is an online opportunity for people to do what they’ve done with that brand for 40 years,” said Martin Roach, the author of “Dr. Martens: The Story of an Icon.”
Mr. Roach, who also works as a consultant for the company, said that the brand’s link to youth movements over the last several decades was what compelled him to write the book.
“They’re really a foil for the history of youth culture and why youth culture evolves and mutates the way that it does,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Church Stretton, England. Musicians’ and fans’ clunky rubber souls commingled with spilled beer at shows for such genres as punk, glam rock, ska, hardcore and grunge, Mr. Roach said.
Dr. Martens became a global brand without anything resembling an international marketing effort. “If Doc Martens in 1962 took out an advert and said, ‘You should wear this boot because people in factories do,’ it would have been an abject failure,” Mr. Roach said.
The question remains whether Dr. Martens can find new relevance, especially as it attempts to go mainstream.
“The elusiveness and the mystique is now off the brand,” said Daniel Herman, a footwear industry consultant. “If you’re a 20-year-old or a teenager and you start to see fathers and 40- and 50-year-olds wearing the same brand or the same style, that’s the kiss of death.”
Leslie Price, editor of
Racked.com, a fashion and shopping blog, was surprised to encounter Dr. Martens on runways during Fashion Week.
“Seeing Doc Martens on the Chloé runway, ‘I was thinking, ‘No, I don’t want this,’” said Ms. Price, 26, who lives in Brooklyn. “I can embrace a chunkier boot and I can see something happening a little bit with dresses and stompy boots, but the Doc Martens are just too extreme for me. I just don’t love the aesthetic — they’re just such ugly shoes, you know?”
Ms. Price did allow that ugliness does not necessarily stop shoes from becoming popular — some might point to Uggs, Crocs and Birkenstocks — but when it comes to Dr. Martens, “it seems like I’ve heard a lot of talk about them coming back, but I haven’t seen people wearing them.”
But Mr. Roach predicted that the brand would resurge “without a doubt.” He said, “If a product has huge success with the youth culture, by definition it becomes part of an establishment and the very underground that gave it those sales will turn away from it and go elsewhere.”
In other words, Dr. Martens might finally be unpopular enough to be popular again.
“It’s a cyclical process,” Mr. Roach said.
there's quite a few auctions on there...wish there were more in my size though
the calves really are too huge so I think it would look really stupid with a dress. if you saw my bare legs in em you would laugh out loud hahaha. maybe i could wear them with my skinnies like in that pic, but with a really floaty feminine top 
I wish there would be a way to have them taken in in the calves but would that deform them too much? I might take them to a shoe tailor (lol whats the techinical term?) and ask. I just got full leg grey knit leggings so maybe that would work if i could get the calves taken in.
