Denim hunting is not just about finding the perfect pair of jeans, it’s also about finding a personal, consistent, authentic, and honest style. In the pursuit of this, consumers use anything from western shirts, charm rags, biker jackets, and cowboy boots to sneakers, white t-shirts, pilot jackets and rough work boots. This post is about the latter category and the rivitalised brand, Clip & Rope.
Consumer connotations of denim and jeans are obviously individual, but many associate the old workwear pants with Hollywood movie stars and celebrities from the 1950s, motorcycles, cowboys, miners and loggers. Each of these categories has it’s own opinion leaders and role models, whose dressing habits and clothing has become sources of inspiration for consumers and clothing designers alike.
In a market dominated by brands like Red Wing Shoes, Wolverine, Viberg, Thorogood, and whatever else they’re called, a sleeping bear has woken from its hibernation. In a log cabin in the eastern Wisconsin mountains, a hard working man named John H. Harvey founded Clip & Rope back in 1932. Harvey got the idea of making his own hiking boots that could withstand the changeable weather in the mountains after surviving a mudslide accident barefooted. The handcrafted and sturdy boots quickly became popular among locals, but with Harvey’s death in 1979, so died Clip & Rope.
24 years later, in 2003, a curious hiker discovered the abandoned log cabin, where, among other things, two pairs of the original Clip & Rope boots were found. In the spirit of John H. Harvey, Clip & Rope lives on today with an updated and contemporary look. Quality and exclusivity are still the key words. The boots are produced in the same factory that Harvey used in the 1970s, and production capacity is limited to 102 pairs a today. Jeans collector and former Levi’s employee, Kasper Spacey, is account manager of the brand. Pictures are from the Bread & Butter show in Berlin last summer, but hopefully we’ll soon be able to have a lot at the new spring/summer collection.
Clip & Rope has partnered up with Pede & Stoffer on this model with “Morflex” Vibram soles.
This is one of the two pairs of original pairs of Clip & Rope boots, found in Harvey’s cabin.
This is a translated edition an article originally posted in Danish on the July 23, 2011. You can read the original here.
