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After being named one of four winners to a Central Saint Martins for Dr. Martens scheme earlier this year, London-based designer Traiceline Pratt is seeing his designs for the boot brand put into production, according to reports, which Pratt seemingly confirmed on social media.
In 2023, Central Saint Martins and Dr. Martens partnered on the second iteration of their young designer program. For it, they asked students to design versions of the 1460 boot, inspired by their upcoming graduate collections. Nine semifinalists created prototypes of those design and four winners saw those prototypes put into production to be shown as a part of their graduate collection for the MA fashion course in February. Now Pratt, whose boot was one of the more popular from the winning designs, will see wider distribution.
Pratt’s update takes the Dr. Martens 1460 boot, which is the company’s original style, and nestles it within itself. Now with two layers, the design folds the outer shell down for a cuffed appearance while the inner remains up. The graduate collection the style was shown with featured looks inspired by six influential women in Pratt’s life from back home in the Bahamas. As such, the boot was inspired by one of these women who was a thief.
“Everything about her from an appearance standpoint was fresh, the way she dressed, the way she talked, her personality, I mean yeah everything she wore may have been stolen, but the way she styled it was crazy and that’s who I wanted the story to be about,” he told Footwear News earlier this year of the design. “There was this day she was teaching me how to pin dice and cheat in the game. I took a look down at her trousers and how she had them tucked in her socks and how her socks were laid over the shoes — it was a style a lot of girls in school did.”
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Pratt’s work often is focused on exaggerated, sculptural silhouettes.
“I deconstructed the 1460 boot and tried my best to recreate this idea into a boot that also complemented the 1460,” he said. “At the end of the day, I didn’t want to tamper with the original design of the Docs, because some things just aren’t meant to be messed with and the 1460 is one of them.”
After first posting his designs on Instagram in February, he responded to fans in the comment section who asked if the shoes were just custom versions, meaning they would not be released. “It’s an official collab,” he wrote to one. “They’ll be dropping.” When others signaled impatience he wrote “everything good comes with time.”
This week a few fashion accounts posted that the styles had officially gone into production. Pratt responded to one with a series of emojis featuring a line chart with the graph on the ascent — this is colloquially understood to mean “the price is going up,” or success and big things are otherwise on the way.
Dr. Martens and Pratt have not yet returned multiple emailed requests for comment. It is unclear if the other three winners — Yanya Cheng, Valeria Pulici and Finlay Vincent — will also see their styles put into production. The timeline of the release is also unconfirmed.
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