srivats
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RJman's opinion, from the cool shoes thread.
To my knowledge, neither the 201 last nor the lasts EG used in making the Peal-branded shoes (the SZO last and I forget the other one) have been in use for over 25 years. EG stopped making shoes for Brooks Brothers back in the mid 1980s. An EG catalog from the 1980s prominently features the 32 and 88 lasts but not IIRC the 201, see Centipede's site. http://centipede.web.fc2.com/oldeg_catalog/23.html The shoes on those lasts that people have recently been sending back to EG are those that we have found on ebay or in thrift stores and likely have outlived their first owners. I imagine that when EG first stated in its catalogs that it would recraft purchasers' shoes on the original lasts it was not imagining the thriving secondary market for the shoes of its deceased customers that the Internet would bring.
It is entirely possible that the 201 lasts, or some of them, particularly in the unusually narrow or wide sizes, were destroyed at that time. Or maybe that guy at EG is just being a dick.
Those rooms where you see hundreds of famous dead people's lasts are at bespoke shoemakers like Lobb St James or Fosters & Sons that have been around for decades. EG only did bespoke for a couple years in the beginning of this century with Tony Gaziano. They don't have a room with hundreds of dead customers' lasts, and won't for a while, unless some serial killer stalker starts going after Manton, me, cusey, bengal and god knows who else. (Actually, I think Tony took the bespoke customers' lasts with him.)
*****
God damn it, will someone mention this on the EG f***** me thread? All the following is to the best of my knowledge/recollection and based on discussions with friends who were doing business with EG at the time or who are as obsessive as I am, as well as a bit of my own research. Hermes bought the Paris John Lobb branch in the early 1970s and acquired the right to sell RTW shoes under the John Lobb name. It started selling RTW Lobb, first made by C&J, in the 1980s. By the early 1990s IIRC Hermes had switched to having Edward Green make the Lobb-branded shoes. Like Hermes does with many of its suppliers, Hermes acquired a stake in Edward Green. In 1996 Hermes upped its stake to a controlling stake in EG. It effectively bought out John Hlustik, the man who revitalized EG in the 1980s, and bought EG's existing facilities in Northampton but told Hlustik and the workforce they could move elsewhere. (As best I can gather, this must have been a takeover by asset purchase.) The old EG plant became the John Lobb RTW factory. Hlustik and the preexisting EG workforce moved into a new but smaller facility. At that time -- if I recall posts from bengal and my discussions with certain friends correctly -- they got rid of some of their older shoe design patterns and some of the lasts they were no longer using to make shoes on in order to save some space. As patterns shouldn't take a whole lot of room this is not totally logical to me, but it's apparently what they did.Originally Posted by RJman
To my knowledge, neither the 201 last nor the lasts EG used in making the Peal-branded shoes (the SZO last and I forget the other one) have been in use for over 25 years. EG stopped making shoes for Brooks Brothers back in the mid 1980s. An EG catalog from the 1980s prominently features the 32 and 88 lasts but not IIRC the 201, see Centipede's site. http://centipede.web.fc2.com/oldeg_catalog/23.html The shoes on those lasts that people have recently been sending back to EG are those that we have found on ebay or in thrift stores and likely have outlived their first owners. I imagine that when EG first stated in its catalogs that it would recraft purchasers' shoes on the original lasts it was not imagining the thriving secondary market for the shoes of its deceased customers that the Internet would bring.
It is entirely possible that the 201 lasts, or some of them, particularly in the unusually narrow or wide sizes, were destroyed at that time. Or maybe that guy at EG is just being a dick.
Those rooms where you see hundreds of famous dead people's lasts are at bespoke shoemakers like Lobb St James or Fosters & Sons that have been around for decades. EG only did bespoke for a couple years in the beginning of this century with Tony Gaziano. They don't have a room with hundreds of dead customers' lasts, and won't for a while, unless some serial killer stalker starts going after Manton, me, cusey, bengal and god knows who else. (Actually, I think Tony took the bespoke customers' lasts with him.)
*****
