May, 2026. I did not need to decide whether I liked Paraboots. I plainly did. I needed to decide whether the shoe I liked in the catalogue belonged to the life that would have to walk in it.
Paraboots are not beautiful in the simple sense. That helps.
A beautiful shoe is easy to admire and often rather difficult to inhabit. It tapers elegantly, shines obediently, and suggests a life in which pavements are short, chairs are plentiful, and nobody has asked the wearer to cross London with a bag. Paraboot comes from another tradition: French, practical, faintly Alpine, and possessed of that rare menswear quality, ugliness with breeding. The shoes look as if they know about rain, which is more than can be said for many otherwise excellent objects.
Character, not glamour, was the first attraction. A Paraboot Reims in black has a specific kind of authority: not city-slick, not country, not American penny loafer, not Italian slipper. It is a loafer built by people who believe rubber soles are not a concession but a position. The Michael, with its Tyrolean outline and Marche sole, carries an even stronger mythology: foresters, architects in bad weather, Alpine professionals, the civilised shoe for uncivilised ground. One understands immediately why the cult exists. After a little walking, one also understands why cults should be approached with practical questions.
The search became interesting when the vocabulary of menswear started to fail. In shop descriptions, a Thiers or a Michael may be called casual, light, easy, or everyday. Those words are true only inside the small republic of welted leather shoes, where a difference of several hundred grams can be treated as a philosophical distinction. Step outside that republic and the terms wobble. A shoe that is light compared with a Chambord may still feel like a small municipal project when measured against knitted trainers. The descriptions were not false. Their frame of reference had been left politely unstated.
Once that distinction appeared, the search changed. “Which Paraboot is best?” gave way to “Which Paraboot belongs to the life it is being asked to enter?” The Reims worked because its construction was more forgiving: Blake stitched, loafer-shaped, lower and more flexible underfoot. The Thiers, with its heavier Norwegian-welted logic and Jannu sole, had a different proposition altogether. It looked adjacent in the catalogue, but mechanically it belonged to another family. Shoes are very good at revealing when the eye has been seduced by a silhouette and the foot has read the engineering notes.
Cafe Michael made the problem more tempting. On paper it was perfect: brown, saturated, versatile, French, slightly odd, rich enough for a Games Blazer and rugged enough for corduroy. It would cover the warm half of the wardrobe with almost mathematical elegance. Black Reims for navy, grey, slate, and cool tailoring; Cafe Michael for camel, olive, brown, russet, and the warmer register. A considered wardrobe loves this kind of architecture. Coherence can start to feel like inevitability.
Construction then undercut the romance. The Michael solved the colour problem while possibly reintroducing the construction problem. The Marche sole may be lower and more gracious than the Jannu, but it is still part of the heavier Paraboot world. If the Reims had succeeded because it was not that, then buying the Michael as if it were simply the brown counterpart became a category error with handsome uppers. A costly one, naturally, because footwear has a habit of correcting taste at retail price.
Evidence eventually overruled romance. The romance was strong: the origin story, the French specificity, the shoe known by a few select people, the promise of an object that might last ten or fifteen years while becoming more itself. But a shoe that cannot be lived in is not an heirloom; it is a small leather reproach by the door.
From there, the sensible answer was to treat the Reims not as an entry point to the whole Paraboot mythology but as the verified branch of it. The black Reims had already proved its use. A brown Reims, or another similarly flexible Paraboot from the nautical side of the house, would extend the wardrobe without asking the body to negotiate a different contract. Less dramatic than buying the iconic Michael, but maturity in dress is often the art of choosing the less dramatic object because it will actually do the work.
Early taste asks what an object means. Developed taste asks what the object does after meaning has finished making its speech. The Paraboot story sits exactly at that junction: wanting the right kind of oddity, the right history, the right silhouette, and then insisting that the shoe also serve the day.
One can admire the Michael forever. One can walk in the Reims. The gentleman’s choice is not always the more iconic one; sometimes it is the one that lets him arrive without making the day all about his shoes.