Märtens has made über casual boots that are utterly impossible to dress up, but they pass in a lot of outfits and environments that wouldn’t otherwise be boot-friendly. Both of which make for a boot that doesn’t look particularly elegant, but I think that’s the point - these boots are meant to look hip. Otherwise, the most characteristic things about the 1460 are the famous yellow stitching around the welt and the famously squishy rubber sole. It’s a tall boot, well over 7 inches (so you need to make sure you have pretty long socks), and the shoe itself ins’t particularly streamlined or contoured, the toe is rather snubby. It’s mostly single stitched so it’s not screaming durability with triple and quadruple stitches all over the place like a pair of White’s.

This is a pretty uncomplicated boot: while Doc Martens calls this “full grain” leather it’s super corrected and smooth, making for a shiny, plasticky, relatively thin leather. What is the difference between Doc Martens 14?.Should I size up or down for Doc Martens 1460?.Martens became the unofficial boot of skinheads and punks and grunge musicians.įor a long time they were made in England but after they almost declared bankruptcy in 2003, they moved production to China and Thailand and according to Business Insider, just 1 percent of their shoes are still made in England.īut the boots remain a symbol of Cool Britannia, so let’s take a closer look at the Asian-made Docs. Somehow their target market went from being that uncool to being incredibly cool and as the 20th century progressed, Dr. For the first decade, 80 percent of their sales were made to housewives over the age of 40. Martens boots were framed as a solution to nagging injuries, orthopedic foot problems, age-related foot pain, things like that. Eventually he went into business making the soles, for a while with discarded rubber from Luftwaffe airfields - that’s the Nazi air force - and at the outset the Dr. He injured his ankle while skiing and found that the Nazis’ standard-issue army boots were uncomfortable on his injured foot, so he designed a new boot made with air-padded soles made from tires.

You know, the army that was being run by the Nazi party at the time. Klaus Märtens who was a doctor in the German Army in 1945. Here’s a weird fact I hadn’t heard before I started researching these boots: the first Dr.

Docs shoes