Julian Imrie in his Los Angeles workshop
Imrie quit college to assist Bruce Weber, went on to work on a horse farm in Montauk, NY, then moved to Amish country, where he salvaged crumbling barns. He spent a year studying the New Testament (in Greek). Then he biked from Los Angeles, his current home base, to Brazil. At one point, he decided to start Julian Boots, his stylish take on 19th-century footwear, but first he learned how to make molds in the English Midlands and to tan leather in a 250-year-old Swiss factory. Now he’s an amateur boot historian, able to slip easily into a disquisition on what a 19th-century Cornish miner might wear. What his boots share with their fuss-free forebears, Imrie says, is that ‘‘you can use them in your garden and then rub them off and go to a wedding.’’
T-Magazine
