Blake Stitched

The construction carries the name of Lyman Reed Blake, an American shoemaker who in 1858 patented a machine capable of sewing a sole directly to an upper. The rights passed to Gordon McKay, who developed and licensed the machine at industrial scale, which is why the same construction is called Blake in Britain and America and McKay across much of Italy. Between them the two names describe one of the most consequential machines of the nineteenth century: it removed the shoemaker from the sole.

One Line of Stitching

The method is elegantly direct. A single chainstitch is driven from inside the shoe, passing through the insole, the lasted upper and the outsole in one pass, on a machine whose curved arm reaches into the completed shoe. There is no welt and no filling, so the sole can be cut close to the upper and the whole shoe is lighter, more flexible and considerably sleeker in profile. Italian houses have favoured it for exactly this reason: a Blake-stitched shoe follows the line of the foot in a way a welted shoe cannot.

What You Give Up

The stitch that holds the shoe together also passes through its interior, which makes the construction less resistant to water and means the thread sits under the wearer’s foot beneath the insole. Resoling is possible but requires a Blake machine, and there are fewer of those than there once were. The Blake-Rapid variant answers both objections by adding a midsole, stitched Blake to the upper and then outseamed to the outsole, at some cost to the slimness that made the construction attractive.

None of this makes one construction superior. It makes them different arguments, and being able to set out the trade honestly to a client is a large part of what separates a good footwear specialist from a merely enthusiastic one.