A pair of John Moore (House of Beauty and Culture) brown leather ’hog toe’ shoes, late 1980s

labelled to the inside, of red croc-embossed leather, with thick black platform sole and squared toes, size 5; together with the original House of Beauty and Culture receipt (3)

John Moore, an experienced cobbler, established House of Beauty and Culture (HOBAC), the extraordinary craft and fashion collective, in an old Victorian house in the East End of London in the late 1980s, the ground floor of which became the cult shop. Moore’s shoe designs were more typical of Dickens’s London and historical workwear than the prevailing trends of the day; the square-cut toes of the present lot are redolent of men’s late 17th-century boots. After his death in 1989, Moore bequeathed his lasts and patterns to his assistant Ian Reid, who continued to use them throughout the 1990s, as well as new designs that continued in the same spirit. In 1995 Reid was commissioned by Alexander McQueen to make the footwear for his notorious Highland Rape runways show. HOBAC had an emphasis on unique hand-made pieces and celebrated artisan skills in all its forms. As well as shoes by John Moore, it sold furniture by Frick & Frack, jewellery by Judy Blame, and for fashion, Christopher Nemeth and Richard Torry who mixed outré camp details with rough industrial textures to pioneer an urban dress code that was taken up by the fashion world in the following decade.

Share this lot: