British footwear company, Dr. Martens, is celebrating its 50 anniversary this month. Five decades later and ‘Doc’ boots still remain the preferred clodhopper of every anti-establishmentarian. To mark the occasion, Dr. Martens have teamed up with ten musical acts to re-record a song emblematic of the iconic boots in any one of the preceding decades. One of the tracks is Noisettes cover of The Buzzcocks “Ever Fallen in Love (with Someone You Shouldn’t Have)”:

Over the years, many hip, young upstarts have adopted the boot as part of their uniform—usually accompanied with stonewash jeans and a curled lip. Over the decades punks, New Wavers, skinheads and gays and lesbians began to adopt the boot to assert their identity. When skinheads laid claim to docs in the 1960s, the boots became synonymous with violence and bigotry. Thankfully, mods, punks, goths, New Wavers and the Seattle grunge scene also came to regard ‘DMs’ as essential kit and hoisted them from forever being solely (pun not intended) associated with hyper-aggression. In the 1980s, gays and lesbians also started to assert their identity by wearing the boots. So did skinheads and gays tread common ground in Dr. Martens? Hardly. The emergence of so many different tribes sporting the boots lead to a sub-classification system developing through a shoelace colour-code. For instance, neo-nazis and skinheads thread the boots with whites laces*—horizontally and not criss-cross—while membership of the LGBT community is declared with rainbow laces.

The boots retain cult icon status and with the likes of de facto Ambassador Agneyss Deyn strutting around town in classic cherry red 1460s, they’ll persevere for years to come as a must-have fashion accessory, as well as a personal or political statement.

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