How many pairs of shoes do you own? How many of them do you actually wear? We’d be willing to bet there’s quite a rift between those two numbers. We’d also be willing to bet that the shoes you do wear regularly follow a simple formula: they’re comfortable, not too bulky, and aren’t in a crazy colour.
Shoes aren’t a whole lot of use if they’re not being worn – and that’s the entire sentiment behind Stepney Workers Club, a London-based footwear brand founded on the values of alternative thinking and wearability.
To understand Stepney Workers Club, you’ve first got to understand the environments that inspired the brand. The name and spirit are derived from traditional workers’ sports clubs – spaces where people gathered and conversed about everything from sport and leisure to music and identity. People attending workers’ sports clubs were never trying to become elite athletes; they simply wanted to participate in sports for the enjoyment of it. Something that has translated into the philosophy of Stepney Workers Club, only instead of sports, it’s shoes.
The London-based brand exists in a realm far removed from the performance-centric and fast-moving fashion trends that often plague footwear brands. Stepney Workers Club’s silhouettes were never meant to be the fastest shoe you owned, nor the most lightweight or innovative – they were meant to be the most worn.
“They’re everyday shoes and they should be worn properly. In fact, we generally prefer them once they’ve been worn for a while.
That relationship between something being considered in its design but very casual in how you live with it has always been important for us.“
The brand specialises in the kind of casual footwear that lives at the end of your bed, ready to be slipped on for anything from late-night corner shop runs to impromptu pub meets. The sort of shoes you develop a bond with and refuse to throw away no matter how faded the canvas gets.
The difference between Stepney Workers’ Club and modern footwear brands can easily be demonstrated. Go into your local shoe shop – Office, shuh, Size? Whatever, and blindly pick out a shoe – you’re likely to end up with an amalgamation of neon rubber and plastic in your hand.
Do the same with Stepney Workers’ Clubs product offering, and the results are going to be wildly different. Instead of synthetic materials, the brand opts for canvas, leather and suede. Comfortable, but hard-wearing materials that promote wearability over anything else.
Then there’s the aesthetic differences. Shoes now can feel like wearable skyscrapers – ledges and levels all over the show. As you’re probably beginning to understand, Stepney Workers Club steers clear of all that.
Take the brand’s Dellow silhouette for instance – a casual shoe constructed of 12oz canvas. At face value the Dellow is incredibly simple – no crazy layers, platforms, or materials – and yet it’s anything but boring – something that can be attributed to Stepney Workers Club’s meticulous eye for detail:
“When a shoe is simple, very small decisions become much more noticeable – the shape of the toe, the height and weight of the sole, stitching, asymmetry, how the upper sits on the foot.
We’ve always liked products that feel familiar at first but have something slightly unusual about them when you look closer. Simple doesn’t necessarily mean generic.
Dellow was really about taking that familiar language and creating our own proportions and character around it. We wanted something immediately recognisable as a low-profile everyday shoe, but with enough oddness that it felt like ours.”
That reference to oddness is crucial too. Irregularity is something that remains central to Stepney Workers Club identity, not just in the context of shoes and their design, but in regards to the influence and inspiration behind the entire brand. For AW26, Stepney Workers Club cite ‘Alternative Sport. Radical individualism. Oddball Interests. Amateur obsession. Music, art and subculture‘ as key influences for the collection – being wildly obsessive is important for Stepney Workers Club.
Obsession, and curiosity is largely why the brand formed in the first place. In 2017, footwear fanatics Simon See and Roger Pereira bonded over the idea of creating an alternative footwear brand that could offer an independent alternative to the classics. Nine years later, here we are.
And while the brand has evolved along the way, the founders haven’t lost their appetite for oddball interests:
“Oddball interests? It could almost be anything… amateur table tennis leagues, pigeon racing, field recording, shin-kicking, crown green bowling, the development of the mind, outsider art, regional music scenes.
It’s really that point where an interest becomes slightly unreasonable that we like. You start learning its history, finding other people who are into it, travelling somewhere because of it, forming friendships around it.
There’s something quite liberating about being really into something without needing to turn it into a career, monetise it or even be particularly good at it.“
In a world where product is increasingly marketed at making you better, stronger or faster at something – it’s refreshing to hear Stepney Worker’s Club admit that their shoes are for the average among us. The normal people, who enjoy sport and activity – but are just as happy bird watching as they are spending time in the gym.
Turning our attention to AW26, the upcoming season is an important one for the brand. More so than it would be usually – AW26 marks not only a load of new product arriving for the brand, but a fresh chapter too. New ownership signifies the brand taking the time to re-evaluate why they became one in the first place – but also acknowledging how the industry is vastly different to when they started out:
“Hype culture has probably made our industry move too quickly. It can create incredible highs, but also pretty serious lows. That’s never really been our thing. We’re much more interested in patience- building something slowly, staying true to our values and creating a brand that can have a lasting cultural impact rather than constantly chasing the next moment.
So this next chapter is partly about taking ownership of that again- being clearer about our point of view, making better product, creating our own cultural context and being more considered about where and how SWC appears.
It’s less about being everywhere and more about making the things we do feel meaningful.“
The next few months promise to be important for the boys at Stepney Worker’s Club – but so long as they remember everything they stand for – wearable footwear, simple yet intriguing design choices, friendship, community, sport, socialising,, pigeon-racing, being into things without being good at them – they’re going to be just fine.
Find out more about Stepney Workers Club and their AW26 range at stepneyworkersclub.com
