How Agyness Deyn saved the Doc Marten

In the same week that we’ve been cheering on Danny Boyle and Team GB, a certain British boot brand has been kicking up a storm. The number of Dr Martens sold on the fashion website ASOS has risen 230 per cent in the past year. Maybe it’s been the rain, but people have carried on buying boots all the way through the summer, with the past few months proving to be the best-selling season yet. DMs are once again the unapologetic stomp of cool and it’s all thanks to London’s edgiest girls, including DM fanatic Agyness Deyn, the new official face (and feet) of the iconic boot brand.

Deyn will be launching an entire fashion collection with Dr Martens this September which will include clothes and accessories as well as footwear. She says she's taken inspiration from the grungey look of the Nineties’ coolest couples — Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis, and Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder.

It’s the latest step in the boot’s reinvention. Dr Martens has already had recent success with its collaboration with Liberty. London’s luxury department store covered boots in the shop’s iconic floral prints and the result was a best-seller. But what it really took to save the DM was a small army of London girls. Alexa Chung started pairing them with demure Fifties frocks. Pixie Geldof was photographed gossiping in them at fashion shows. Shaven-headed model Alice Dellal — now the face of Chanel — made them an integral part of her glamour punk aesthetic. And then Deyn was snapped so often in the boots that Dr Martens asked her to become its ambassador — and sales have gone through the roof.

The original boot was designed by Klaus Märtens, a German army doctor who had injured his ankle and was finding it hard to walk in his Army boots. In 1960 he collaborated with the Griggs family, established English shoe-manufacturers, and together they anglicised the name and produced the first pair of black, air-soled Dr Martens.

Since then the boots have laced themselves into the vibrant social history of this country (you missed a trick there, Danny boy) as regulation footwear for skinheads, mods, goths, glam rockers and grunge kids. But in the past decade it seemed the boots had lost their way, with international profits down by more than two-thirds. Cue Aggy Deyn and a posse of pretty post-punks riding to the rescue. Yes, the boot’s in again.