It was early December 1986, I had returned from Korea and Reebok had just had another move around. My cousin Rob and I were now in a small room, which housed the building alarm system and two glass walls that overlooked the factory shop floor and was next to Marion’s eyeleting machine; which gave a reverberating thump every two seconds. To accompany the background hum, hiss and thud of the shoe making process. My phone rang and the Receptionist announced, that “there was a guy from London on the phone who wanted to talk about shoes, everyone else was busy, would I speak to him.” He introduced himself as Lionel and he worked for Katharine Hamnett, ‘Okay’ I was a bit lost, but as we continued to talk, I began to realise what he was talking about. ‘Andrew and George’ said we were the people to talk to. I agreed he could come up to the factory and discuss what he wanted. It was only after I put the phone down did it dawn on me that Andrew and George were WHAM! (yes, that WHAM!).
Katharine Hamnett had started her business in 1979, but had come to represent ‘80’s pop culture in 1983 with her block letter printed ‘slogan T-shirt ‘CHOOSE LIFE’ worn by George Michael of WHAM! and Queen’s Roger Taylor amongst others. Famously Ripped off by ‘Frankie goes to Hollywood’ and their ‘FRANKIE SAY…’ campaign.
Lionel caught the train to Bolton, and I picked him up and brought him to the factory in Bradley Fold, a quick tour and then to business. They wanted some of our super soft shoes without branding for their models on the catwalk. Lionel wanted a softer and more exotic, than just a pair of our Classic leather shoes. The shoes had to be all Black so as not to detract from Katherines Famous Slogan Tees.
We started to dig around in our sample cupboard, which housed all the abandoned and rejected options from the last three years, I kept everything! We got to about box three when he picked up one shoe an early attempt at our $100 Super Leather Classic which had just become LX8500. I showed him that, perfect!
We then picked through the different swatches of material we had in black and began to specify the shoe:
The softer black 0.8mm goat skin glove leather we had ordered as an option but not used.
Trimmed with the black monitor lizard skin from S.O.Rowe.
He liked the big logo of the LX8500 but wanted it all black, that would be fun I thought!
I made some tweaks to the original sample to allow for the large labels and sent the patterns off to be graded, then asked USA to make me 100 large labels and our tongue label supplier got the same request.
We hand cut the first sample a month later and except for one or two minor issues we got approval from Lionel and made the 40 pairs, all cut by hand by me and Rob Foster and sent them down to London ready for what would become known as ‘London Fashion Week’.
These days designer collaborations are major part of the sports footwear business, Reebok’s first step into that business happened 34 years ago!
© David Foster 2020
If you would like to read more about Lionel Copley and what he is doing now you can do so here: https://www.falke.com/uk_en/emagazine/london/people/lionel-copley/
Foster's Famous Shoe's 