Cleverley Fairbanks

Like a couple of abandoned puppies, these shoes just showed up at my front door one day looking for a home. The Fairbanks elastic-sided slip-on model (pictured at left) from the new semi-bespoke Anthony Cleverley line at G.J. Cleverley & Co. Ltd.. I do not specifically recall ordering them and may have done so while enjoying a few cocktails with betweeded chums in Beverly Hills. Some people crash their Benz or fall down stairs after one too many drinks; I order semi-bespoke shoes. Whatever. It happens. At any rate, I think I shall keep them. This past January the American men's journal Esquire published a blurb on the Anthony Cleverley line, which I reproduce here:

London, the early 1960s: The Beatles were blowing up, Carnaby Street was heating up, and G. J. Cleverley was kitting out the world's biggest badasses with his long, lean bespoke shoes. But Cleverley wasn't the only shoemaker in town or, as it turns out, in his own family. His brother's son Anthony was a hell of a shoemaker, too, but Anthony, by accounts an eccentric, physically disabled recluse, preferred to work alone, holed up in the attic of his north London home, making shoes for a few rich clients. Over the decades, Anthony filled a notebook with sketches of his favorite designs, and before he died in 1997, he willed that book to G. J. Cleverley's current owner, George Glasgow. For years the book sat untouched, but when Glasgow began considering ways to expand his company, he turned to Anthony's book and found sketches for narrowly shaped, ingeniously detailed shoes. Seven of Anthony's best designs now make up G. J. Cleverley's new semi-bespoke line, Anthony Cleverley, and they might just make him famous yet.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/endorsement/cleverley-shoes-012110#ixzz14t1hDPn3