Harrys London just dropped the first collection under its new creative director, with substance and style in spades.
English shoes have the reputation for being chunky, heavy and built like tanks. The original Harrys offer was sweet relief to Londoners: professional shoes that wore like sneakers, making heading to work feel like setting foot on a basketball court.
Fidler, a graduate of Northumbria University, trained as a designer in the north-east of England, and still has the easy going, down-to-earth manner the region is known for. He cut his teeth at Ralph Lauren in New York, designing for the nascent RLX sub-brand and working on the Aspen Ski School collab with legendary executive Read Worth. “We would sit and chat for hours,” Fidler recalls, “and I’d wonder how he had the time.
The Warren trainers are cut from Acqua suede, a material impregnated with water-repellant to stand up to rain and puddles.The key is to embrace practicality and change, not to let tradition become constraint. “We’re proud of technology, proud of innovation, providing something that’s suitable for every day in life.” The brand’s acqua suede is impregnated with water repellant throughout the hide, rather than merely coated with a proofing spray.
The core collection, Fidler says, is “subtle and hard-working loafers and lace ups, in concrete gray and chocolate brown to match tailoring and denim. … But I’m no longer imagining it as only city. I wanted to open up the offer.” Rather than making soft shoes, these days Harrys is imagining tough models and softening them: work boots in buttery deerskin, trainers with merino uppers, suede chukkas with a gum sole rather than a clunky double welt, Oxfords with gel insoles.
Beyond design work, Fidler is now back at his alma mater as a design professor. “When I talk with students, I always try to present the product being sold in Dover Street Market, or a New York department store. The challenge is to imagine that they’ve created the product even though it’s barely out of their sketchbook. … I always say: imagine when it’s on the catwalk, imagine how it looks on the rail.
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