Even my nearest and dearest wouldn’t say with a straight face that I have a good sense of fashion — or indeed, any sense of fashion. In the past, let loose from the daily requirement to don a conservative suit and tie, I may well have struggled a bit to strike the right sartorial note – I admit it freely.

Over the years I’d try different things – you know, the metrosexual approach, the hip-hop gangsta look, the preppy style. None really stuck for long, before changes of fashion and/or the ridicule of friends and family drove a re-think.

Being here in Australia, it’s hard to escape reminders of one particularly egregious misstep, associated as it is with a particularly Aussie brand of clothing: R. M.  Williams. Everyone here knows Williams: it’s well-designed, made with quality materials, and marketed diligently. It sticks close to its inspiration: the styles arising from country occupations, to do with horses, cattle, dogs and the like.

You know the kind of thing: the stout jeans, checked shirts, wide-brimmed hats – and of course, the foundation stone of the whole range, the elastic-sided boots. This design enables the wearer to drag them on and off without bothering with laces – assisted by the stout loops fore and aft, so you can pull them open with both hands and insert your foot.

Interestingly – diligent research reveals – this design was actually imported from the UK, where it was designed by Joseph Sparkes Hall in 1837. You’ll be familiar with their pointier cousins, made famous by the Beatles, the Chelsea boot. There are a number of brands using a familiar theme here, but Williams seems to have parlayed the work-boot ethos into the most successful lifestyle brand, with pricing aimed at the horsy set.

Williams’s boots are made from a single piece of leather, stitched up the back, and allegedly take 80 pairs of hands to manufacture. You can get them with leather soles or rubber soles; different grades and kinds of leather, including kangaroo; and multiple shades from pale brown through tan to black, with suede an option for the effete townie. The women’s version has various heel choices, including higher ones, Cuban-styled ones, and something called the ‘Adelaide’.  

Overall, these boots are renowned for lasting for ages and for assuming a comfort like mink-lined bedroom slippers as the leather moulds to the unique topography of the wearer’s feet. And they can be re-soled and repaired by the manufacturer, giving your feet a pair of lifelong companions. 

So there I was, a bachelor of indeterminate personal style but reasonable disposable income, compelled to make a rare journey to London’s West End to buy Christmas presents on an evening attractively vacillating between freezing sleet and mushy snow. Snivelling my way down Regent Street, I happened upon the London flagship store of R. M. Williams. Something – perhaps a sense of affinity due to a perceived (though not ultimately real) shared colonial experience – drove me to go inside.

I liked it all. The checked shirts echoed the national dress of my people (white Zimbabweans); the carefully-designed functional practicality appealed to my functionally practical side. I selected a funky moleskin jacket and some jeans, but what could not be left untried was of course the boots.

Now, a short digression is in order, with apologies, but it’s important to the story. I must reveal  that, for someone quite tall and expandingly large, I am cursed with absurdly small feet. I’ve heard it all over the years – the totally mythical correlation with the size of one’s manhood, the queries about why I don’t topple over – but the fact remains, these unfeasible extremities have had some odd permutations, not least the premature termination of my marathon-running career due to repeated injury.

Anyway, it soon became obvious, in R. M. Williams’s London flagship store, that the one-piece leather uppers and powerful elastic were not designed for stubby, rigid, high-arched feet. No amount of pulling on the two loops would facilitate the ingress of my foot. The leverage bestowed by a shoehorn of about a metre’s length made no difference. We tried the wider model, to no avail. Finally, someone dug into the storeroom and found a pair of extra-extra wide – approximately as wide as they were long. And in went my foot, not unlike an Ugly Sister cramming her a horny trotter into Cinderella’s glass slipper.

I was delighted. The jacket was cool, the jeans were hot, and the boots – well, I was striding about like a Jackaroo on an Outback station, feet tightly encased in those one-piece uppers and compressed by that powerful elastic, heels elevated by those solid leather soles. I was rugged and stylish, warm in the winter chill and in for a lifetime’s faithful service from my antipodean footwear.

And so to Edinburgh for Christmas with my sister and her family. I knew something was afoot (ahem) when my sister complimented my new kicks with a deadpan expression. My suspicions were confirmed when those hard leather soles skidded on the frosty pavement outside the pub, compelling me to maintain my balance with waving arms in the manner of Torvill and/or Dean, eliciting hearty guffaws from my loving sibling.

And that was that. My eyes were opened to the ridiculousness of the short, stubby ‘Hughes hooves’ as my brother-in-law christened them. Once they’d been christened thus, I couldn’t drag those boots on again. What’s good for the long-footed, prehensile-toed Aussie stockman is clearly not so great for the curtailed digits of the style-challenged pommie city boy.

The jacket, though, served me well for twenty years, including travel to places of varying chilliness. It just got better with age and use, as good-quality duds should – and when the time came, it was passed on to a younger man of my acquaintance whose own personal style has been known to raise an eyebrow – he likes it because it’s black and, although he’s no goth, it suits his romantic poetic outlook on the world he’s set to inherit.

Stories don’t have to have morals, but in this case, I think it’s easy to conclude that no matter how iconic the design, robust the materials, or rugged the manufacture, not every style choice will enhance the wearer’s profile. Sometimes, when the heart says ‘yes’, the head – or in this case, the feet – should absolutely say ‘no’.