EPILOGUE TO THE WATERPROOF FOOTWEAR TRILOGY This Long View piece provides civilizational context to the Waterproof Footwear Trilogy (Articles 022, 018, 023). Read those first to understand the molecular ceiling. Then return here to understand what we traded when we hit it. Part 1: The Plastic Boot | Part 2: Wellington Boots | Part 3: The Waterproof Gap
In 1659, a fisherman named Thomas Barker published instructions for keeping your feet dry. Heat one pint of linseed oil with half a pound of mutton suet, six to eight ounces of beeswax, and half a pennyworth of rosin in a small pot until the mixture reaches "milk temperature"—warm to the touch, not scalding. Apply it with a hair brush to new boots before the shoemaker finishes them. Brush them again after they arrive.1
Specific. Sensory. Strange to read now.
This was not specialist knowledge. Barker was writing an angling manual, not a cordwainer's treatise. The recipe appears between sections on choosing hooks and reading water. Waterproofing your boots was as ordinary as baiting a line. You heated oil in your kitchen. You brushed it into leather with a tool you already owned. You did this because if you did not, your feet would be wet, and wet feet in November could kill you.
We do not think this way anymore. Waterproofing is not something we do. It is something boots either have or do not have when we buy them. A property, not a practice. A noun, not a verb.
We forgot that for most of human history, it was the other way around.
I. The Practice
Barker's recipe was one formulation among many. Victorian household manuals recommended gutta-percha rubbed into leather soles with a hot iron, applied when the boot was clean and dry—"dryness and freedom from dirt were the essentials to success."2 Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) instructed servants to keep three brushes for boot care: one hard to remove mud, one soft to apply blacking, one medium for polishing.3 When boots became waterlogged, they were to be dried slowly, never near fire, always on their sides.3
Football boots traditionally required regular dubbin applications—a practice that leather care specialists now describe as "out of favour," a phrase that makes maintenance sound like a trend rather than what it was: the ordinary cost of keeping leather functional.4 Medieval cordwainers served seven-year apprenticeships learning to work with leather that responded to water, air, and time.5 The apprenticeship was not excessive. The material was complex.
Waxed cotton jackets needed annual re-treatment. Barbour introduced its re-waxing and repair service in 1921 with a promise printed in its catalog: "If you want to give your old Beacon a new lease of life, send it along to us (in summer-time if possible), and we will re-oil and repair it, if it is worth repair."6 That service has operated continuously for over a century.6 The formula evolved—linseed oil gave way to paraffin wax in the 1930s when it became clear that linseed yellowed and cracked in cold weather, and cupro-ammonia treatment was removed around 2005—but the practice persisted.7
The materials required maintenance because they could degrade. Beeswax biodegrades in weeks to months through microbial breakdown.8 Vegetable-tanned leather can compost in ten to twelve months under industrial conditions, though degradation rates vary by tanning method and finishing treatments.9 Linseed oil, left untreated, eventually rots leather—which is why Barker specified reapplication, why Victorian manuals emphasized regular care, why the practice was not optional.
This was not a flaw in the chemistry. It was the feature that made the chemistry work. Materials that biodegrade appropriately require ongoing attention precisely because they respond to their environment. The "failure" was what allowed them to disappear when you were done with them.
We maintained relationships with materials because the materials required it. Then we invented materials that did not.
II. The Chemistry
The transition was sharp. According to SATRA—the Shoe and Allied Trades Research Association, the footwear industry's primary research body—the 1960s marked the decisive shift to PVC in footwear manufacturing.10 Polyvinyl chloride had been synthesized decades earlier, but its application to mass-market boots accelerated in this decade, driven by rising leather costs and the development of PVC injection molding systems that offered "faster and cheaper processes than were required by vulcanised rubber."10
SATRA's documentation is precise: "During the 1960s, research into the use of plastics was deemed a priority."10 The priority was not performance. Natural rubber Wellington boots, introduced in the 1850s following Charles Goodyear's vulcanization process, were already waterproof and widely available.11 The priority was economics. Demand for leather was rising. Leather was expensive. PVC was consistent, moldable, and required no treatment during use.
André Courrèges' iconic 1964 go-go boots, now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, were originally made of white kidskin and patent leather.12 But fashion historians note that "many of the subsequent versions and copies were made in PVC, vinyl, and other plastics" as the style moved to mass production.12 Bright colors. Instant waterproofing. No dubbin required.
We fell in love with not having to think.
The chemistry that made this possible is the chemistry that now defines our problem. PVC resists water because its molecular structure resists everything. According to peer-reviewed research published in Frontiers in Microbiology (2020), PVC has an environmental lifespan of 50 to 150 years, and no enzymes capable of effectively biodegrading PVC have been identified and characterized.13 The carbon-carbon backbone that makes PVC waterproof is the same structure that makes it enzymatically inert.13
What we marketed as "durability" during use, we now call "persistence" after disposal. It is the same molecular property. We just named it differently depending on whether we still needed it.
Beeswax required weekly application because natural enzymatic pathways could break it down.8 PVC requires no maintenance because no such pathways exist.13 The chemistry that freed us from weekly rituals did not tell us it would outlive us by a century. Or perhaps it did, and we chose not to ask.
III. What Survives
Red Wing Shoes currently manufactures All Natural Leather Conditioner containing mink oil, pine pitch, and beeswax.14 The same materials Barker used in 1659. The formula is marketed as "heritage" or "premium care," which is a way of saying: this is what worked before we forgot how.
Barbour still requires annual re-waxing. The company's professional service handles 60,000 jackets annually and sells 100,000 tins of wax.15 This is not a museum practice. This is a functioning infrastructure maintained across generations because it works.
These products survive almost exclusively in heritage and premium markets. Not because the chemistry failed—it demonstrably did not fail—but because mass-market economics made PVC unbeatable on price. According to market research, the global PVC footwear market was valued at $65.14 billion in 2022.16 That is not the market for footwear. That is the market for PVC footwear specifically. A material that costs less, lasts longer in use, and requires no care.
The economic advantages were real. PVC is significantly more affordable than natural materials, and injection molding ensures uniformity and efficiency in mass production.17 In regions where footwear accessibility was previously constrained by cost, PVC democratized waterproof boots. That benefit is not trivial. It is not nostalgia to acknowledge that dubbin rituals were work, that quality leather boots were historically expensive—"five or six times the cost of shoes," a "garment of wealthier classes"18—and that the convenience PVC offered was genuine.
But we should have known what we were trading.
When we dismantled the practice, we also dismantled the infrastructure that made it viable. The local harness makers who rehabilitated worn boots. The apprenticeship systems that transmitted material knowledge across generations. The common understanding that waterproofing was something you did, not something boots possessed. That knowledge did not disappear because it was wrong. It disappeared because we no longer needed it, and then we forgot we ever had it.
Red Wing still sells mink oil. Barbour still re-waxes jackets sent by post. These are not acts of defiance. They are evidence that we had another option, and we chose to make it economically unviable for most people instead of molecularly impossible.
IV. The Pattern
We have done this before.
Gardens became lawns became Astroturf. Each transition sold as liberation from maintenance. Each carrying costs we discovered later. Cooking became microwaving. Repair networks became returns policies. Knowing became using.
The pattern is this: we trade practice for product, relationship for convenience, maintenance for permanence. The trade feels rational at the time because the work being eliminated is real work. Weekly dubbin was tedious. Annual re-waxing required planning. The local cobbler knew your gait and could adjust accordingly, but you had to walk there, wait, return. PVC eliminated all of it. Just buy new boots when the old ones wear out. Except they do not wear out. Not in any timeframe that matters.
Article 023 of the Waterproof Footwear Trilogy established that waterproof and biodegradable are molecularly incompatible if you demand permanent waterproofing.19 The molecular truth stands. Our ancestors did not demand permanent waterproofing. They accepted "good enough with maintenance" because the alternative did not exist.
We made the alternative exist. And the cost of "perfect without maintenance" was 50 to 150 years of environmental persistence.13
This is not an argument to return to 17th-century maintenance rituals. It is not a prescription for what you should buy or how you should live. It is an observation about what happens when we optimize for convenience without asking what "convenient" actually means.
Convenient for whom? Convenient when? Convenient if we ignore the century after we are done with it?
I am not arguing that PVC was morally wrong. I am arguing that we did not know—or chose not to know—that the chemistry which made waterproofing "set and forget" also made it "set and stay forever." Those are not separate properties. They are the same molecular stability, valued during use, lamented after disposal.
The irony is almost unbearable. We built a material that lasts forever and used it to wrap our feet.
We are excellent at solving problems. We are less good at noticing that the solution is tomorrow's problem.
This is not doom. This is human. Predictable. And predictable can be worked with.
We will figure this out, or we will not. In the meantime, here we are: a species that learned to make a material that outlives us by a century, and we did it so we would not have to heat beeswax on a Tuesday. You have to admire the audacity, if nothing else.