Guidi at W Department

Guidi is a tannery that came to make shoes, rather than a shoe house that buys leather. The Conceria Guidi Rosellini was founded in 1896 in Pescia, in Tuscany, by Guido Guidi, Giovanni Rosellini, and Gino Ulivo, in a district where the trade is old enough to have had a guild of tanners and shoemakers since the fourteenth century. The company today is GUIDI 1896 and works from Ponte Buggianese, a few miles down the same valley, under Ruggero Guidi. It still tans for other people. In its own words it is “a trusted partner for designers around the world, who rely on GUIDI for distinctive leathers and bespoke treatments,” and the list it publishes of the houses it has worked with runs from Yohji Yamamoto and Undercover to nonnative and 1017 ALYX 9SM.

The tanning is vegetable, which is the slow method: hides worked with tannins drawn from bark rather than with chromium salts. Guidi will take that process across calf, goat, horse, and kangaroo, and horse is the one the house is known for. It appears two ways. Full grain horse is the outside of the hide, close and dense. Reverse is the same hide turned over so that the flesh side faces out, which is where the napped, faintly furred surface on a Guidi boot comes from. Neither is finished with a varnish or a coating. The stated intention is the opposite of covering the leather: the tannery’s own description of its footwear is vegetable tanning “which, instead of covering the leather, is aimed at exalting its natural flower,” and it says plainly that veins, scratches, and grain differences are what that leaves behind.

Then comes the part that makes a Guidi recognizable at ten paces. Color goes on last. The house calls it “refined natural piece-dyeing methods, allowing the leather to evolve over time and develop its own character,” which means the boot is built first and dyed afterward, whole, so that upper, welt, and sole arrive at the same tone together and the seams read as continuous rather than as joins. The drying is unhurried, and the leather draws in as it dries. That is the source of the creasing and the slightly collapsed line that a new pair already has, before anyone has walked in it.

Underneath the softness the construction is orthodox and heavy. Goodyear welting, stacked leather heels and double leather soles on the classical lasts, Vibram lugs where the model asks for grip, handwork in Italy throughout. The house works to model numbers rather than to seasonal names, so a shape earns a figure and then persists: the 788 has descendants, and new lasts are described against it. The closure Guidi returns to again and again is a zip, at the back or up the front, which is a fastening that leaves the vamp uninterrupted and lets the leather do all the talking.

Most of what we choose for the store is chosen because it will still be good in ten years, and leather is the material where that argument is easiest to make and hardest to fake. A coated hide looks resolved on the day it is bought and never changes again. A vegetable-tanned one looks unfinished on the first day and is not finished, which is the point: it takes the shape of the foot, darkens where it is handled, and holds the creases of the way a particular person walks. Guidi is that argument in its most literal form, made by people who control the process from the raw hide forward instead of ordering it in.

It also sits naturally beside the Italian and Japanese work already in the store, where dyeing and finishing are treated as design decisions rather than as the last stage of production. A boot that is colored after it is assembled belongs to the same way of thinking as a garment that is dyed after it is sewn. Both accept that the maker gives up a measure of control at the end, and both are recognizable at a distance because of it.

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Shop Guidi

Guidi works to model numbers, and one model is made in more than one leather and on more than one sole, so the number is only half the answer. If you are working out which half you want, the store is open daily, 11 to 5, at 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza.