Viberg Derby Shoe

Two domes down. Huh, didn’t expect this to end up being a learning experience but that’s pretty much what the last two years have been for me. I’ve been hopelessly into shoes since the first pair of Air Jordans came out in the 80’s and I thought I knew a lot about them. Well, I did—but only parts. What I didn’t know much about was the actual leather which the last couple years in SD has been a crash course on. Last year doming navy CXL was a lesson in ‘wow really don’t like how this color of CXL fades’ and ‘wtf were you thinking trying to dome these things?’. This year doming latigo horsehide has been a lesson of ‘wow, I really don’t like any CXL at all’ So having learned from trying to style a set of fits around a faded aquamarine color, I opted for one of the 15 or so different colors Viberg calls camel, a bright tan that could be worn daily-it still cramped my style but no so much that I couldn’t wear them daily. But what happened is I got hooked on horses. Like, cow leather wears about as well as you can ride cows in comparison Thought this color would be a great canvas for patina but it mostly just got a lot darker. Stains stand out for a few days and then the leather consumes them. Started out near yellow it transformed into about the same shade as Trickers Acorn but much richer and is a close match to the French binding now. The unstructured toes have collapsed completely and have a beautiful profile now. I rode this horse every day In my early SD days I had a closet of calfskin dress shoes & a Seinfeld-esque ‘shell cordovan what’s the deal’ feeling about the subject. But just a few months into this regular horsehide and the way it rippled and rolled without giant ridges of loose-grain and I got it. I can’t help but look at some of my old pairs now like they were lasted with roided out body builders, still bulging veins and all.Sold most of my CXL shoes on ebay, dyed the shit out of my navy dome boots from the year prior. It really is all abot the leather.