Dune London Boots, and Which Shape to Buy This Autumn
Dune London is the brand people land on when a £30 boot has already let them down once and a designer pair still feels mad. It is the middle rung. Whether that...
Dune London is the brand people land on when a £30 boot has already let them down once and a designer pair still feels mad. It is the middle rung. Whether that rung is worth standing on depends entirely on which shape you pick, because the range is doing two quite different jobs at once.
“Nobody regrets the boot they spent too much on. Everyone regrets the cheap pair that lasts 3 wears...”
What Dune London is known for
Daniel Rubin started Dune in 1992 as a single concession on Oxford Street, out of a family that had been making shoes in London since his grandfather set up a Whitechapel workshop in the 1890s. The stated idea from the beginning was affordable luxury, and there are now over 350 Dune locations worldwide. What that translates to on a product page is real material. Across the women's boots we carry, most name leather or suede in the title rather than a faux version, and that is the single thing separating a Dune boot from the stuff sitting two price brackets below it.
Prices in our catalogue run from about £35 to £199, with most landing near £130. So, not cheap. What the money buys you is an upper that will take polish and a shape that holds after a wet month.
Knee-high is the shape to buy this season
Every autumn round-up worth reading has landed in the same place. Who What Wear called ultra-tall boots the story of the season, well above the ankle boot that ran the last few years, and Grazia's Daisy Murray put riding boots and simple knee-highs on a nine-strong trend list. Dune is unusually well set up for that: roughly four in ten of its boots here are knee-highs, and the brown suede ones outnumber the black.
Brown is the bit worth paying attention to. Black knee-highs pull an outfit towards evening whatever you do to them. A chocolate or tan suede pair will go out with denim on a Saturday and a knitted skirt on a Tuesday, which is a lot more use out of £160.
Dune London knee-high boots
The ankle boot, if you want one pair that does everything
If a knee-high feels like too much of a commitment, ankle boots are the larger half of the range and the easier buy. Go for the leather ones with a squared block heel. They sit under a wide-leg trouser without bunching, which is where a slim or stretch-shaft ankle boot falls down.
Three things worth knowing before you buy
Check whether it says wide fit
A chunk of the Dune boot range is offered in a wide fit as a separate listing under the same style name. If the standard version has pinched on you before, the wide one is a different last, not just a roomier size.
Spray the suede before it goes outside
Most of the brown boots here are suede, and suede takes a watermark the first time it gets properly rained on. A protector spray costs a few pounds. Do it the night before, not on the way out.
Mind where the shaft lands
A knee-high that stops at the widest part of your calf looks like it is fighting you. Just under the knee, or well below it. Anywhere in between is the hard version.
The same shape, across other brands
The point of shopping this way is that you can see the Dune version next to what everyone else is charging for the same silhouette. M&S, Jones Bootmaker, Long Tall Sally and Ravel all have a knee-high leather boot in the catalogue, at four different prices.
What to wear them with
The pairing doing the most work this autumn is a knee-high boot with a knitted midi skirt, so the only gap is a few centimetres of tights. It is warmer than it looks and it sidesteps the shaft-meets-hem problem entirely.
Late September is the sensible moment to do this. Boot ranges are at their fullest before the first genuinely cold week, and a knee-high is not a shape you want to be choosing from whatever is left in a 4 and a 9. If you already know which pair you want, there is no argument for waiting.