He Designed Big Shoes to Match His Huge Pants (EXCLUSIVE)
Sage Nation is getting big but its pants are already huge. The London menswear label’s specialty is a ballooning trouser with its excessive width only partly contained inside the fold of a vast box pleat. Then there’s its painter pants, an XXL recreation of traditional workwear, and the Welt Trouser where a center seam only somewhat reigns in the billowing shape. Even Sage Nation’s shorts don’t reach below the knee as much as they swallow it entirely.
Since 2020, Sage Nation has been delivering its wonderfully sculptural legwear. Now, the brand’s founder, Sage Toga-Nation, tells Highsnobiety that it has found a shoe that “really works well,” with its famously huge trousers.
“Footwear has always been something the brand was going to expand into naturally, it’s been about waiting for the right time,” says Toga-Nation. “The beginnings of the brand was really about establishing its DNA within apparel… as we start to introduce more footwear it will allow our customers to fully build Sage Nation into their wardrobe.”
The first Sage Nation footwear is handmade in the rural Italian commune of Montegranaro by the shoemaking company Officine Creative.
“In my opinion, they have some of the best-made shoes on the market,” says Toga-Nation, who is fresh from debuting what is ostensibly a Sage Nation dress shoe, with a sleek profile, a smooth buffalo leather body, and a heeled leather sole. The thing is, it isn’t particularly dressy.
Laces weave between metal lace hooks lifted from hiking boots (each pair comes with black cotton laces and striped “hiking laces”) while the shoe’s thin body ends in a slightly bulbous toe that wears a cap akin to a work shoe. The shoe’s distinct contours come largely from Officine Creative’s G-stone ergonomic last — a last is the mold footwear is crafted around — designed to create a “a foot-like shape” and it sure looks like it.
“I am always drawn to the silhouette and fabric first. The G-stone last is a silhouette that I feel is subtly iconic,” says Toga-Nation. “The toe cap was introduced to emphasise the quality and softness of the leather. The leather above the toe cap becomes beautifully creased and crunched with time, whilst the toe cap stays sharp, sturdy, with a high-shine.
“This contrast is really nice to me,” he adds, noting that the option of formal or rugged laces underscores this feel.
While this is Toda-Nation’s first time designing shoes for his own label, the designer has experience with smart (but not stiff) shoes. In his other role, as creative director of 30-year-old menswear label YMC, the designer created the "Division Oxford” with heritage shoemaker Grenson. Like his own silhouette, it rethinks how a classic leather shoe might be laced; it’s since become a sell-out success.
But Sage Nation is where Toda-Nation calls all the shots, producing more exaggerated shapes than those he proposes at YMC and, thus far, more experimental shoes. Whereas the YMC Oxford is sleek, Sage Nation’s is rugged with a skew-whiff shape.
Just like Sage Nation’s oversized parka jacket is offset by a tightly cropped body and its classic white poplin shirt wears meandering panels of ruching, the brand’s shoes balance wearability and eccentricity. That’s the grey area Sage Nation so adeptly operates in. And these shoes are the beginning of Toda-Nation stepping up his game to new heights.“We are now at 5 years in the journey,” he says, “so it is only right that we start expanding into different areas.”
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