Anthony Bourdain’s style was never about high fashion but about durability, comfort and authenticity. From his beloved Clarks Desert Boots and pre-distressed Kenneth Cole leather jacket to Converse All Star Ox and Boulet cowboy boots, he chose practical, affordable pieces that could handle travel, weather and wear, becoming iconic simply because he lived in them everywhere he went.
Unless you are an avid Bourdain superfan, you probably wouldn't name Anthony Bourdain as someone who broke the boundaries of men's fashion. That, however, doesn’t mean that television's beloved chef raconteur did not have a distinctive sense of personal style. Think of him, and the image of his lean figure in jackets and a pair of jeans, cigarette in hand (and the occasional sunglasses) pops up almost universally.
His clothes weren’t particularly expensive. Nor were they fashion holy grails that everyone was losing their minds for at the time. They were just pieces that fit the most basic function that clothes are made for: fit the occasion, fight the weather, and hopefully, not look too garish (aka look reasonably well). They were elevated to desirability simply by the fact that Tony Bourdain wore the shit out of them.
Take, for example, the pre-distressed Kenneth Cole leather jacket he wore in the first episode of No Reservations. It’s the same one he is seen wearing in that one photo in a Parisian cafe. Over the years, it has become so synonymous with him that on the occasion of the release of his biopic, Tony, Kenneth Cole has rereleased the jacket in his memory.
The same can be said for his shoes. More than anything, Bourdain dressed for comfort. He famously loved his Clarks Desert Boots so much that he would reportedly buy up to four pairs at once. In a 2013 article he wrote for Esquire US, titled How to Travel Like Anthony Bourdain, the travel show host wrote how he liked the pair simply because “they go off and on very quickly, they're super comfortable, you can beat the hell out of them, and they're cheap”.
Desert boots in general have been around for a little less than a hundred years now, first worn by British soldiers in the desert in the Second World War. Some five years after the war ended, Clarks introduced their model of the boots, which became so popular that everyone from Jamaican reggae musicians to hippies and anti-war protestors of the 60s would don a pair.
As Bourdain noted, the OG Clarks boots have laces for you to tie them when you put them on. But the ankle-opening in these shoes is so wide that you could simply treat them as slip-ons. Bourdain famously wore the sand suede ones, an economic choice as suede doesn’t crease the way a comparably priced pair of leather boots would. Thanks to the soft crepe rubber sole, you can easily walk around in them across different terrain.
But more than anything, you can wear a pair of Clarks Desert Boots to almost any situation and with almost any outfit. Bourdain wore them everywhere, be it with a blazer and jeans at The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, or with a khaki shirt and ash cargos when he went trekking through war-torn Congo in Parts Unknown. New York Times once described them as the Caesar Salad of shoes, a pair that looks just as good on a forty-year-old as it does on a freshman in college. As history would have it, they would go down as the definitive Anthony Bourdain shoes.
The other pair that he wore often was the Converse All Star Ox, Chuck Taylor’s low-top cousin. Like the Clarks boots, they came around in the 1950s, when basketball players wanted a shoe that gave more flexibility around the ankle. From there, they spread to beachgoers in California, ultimately finding themselves a permanent place in skateboard culture.
It goes without saying that a shoe made for skaters will be comfortable. You could argue they were easier to put on than the Clarks, given that they don't have ankles to deal with.
The interesting part is, the particular pair he used to wear, a now-discontinued model called Destroyed Denim, also came with frayed edges, bronzed hardware and washed-out laces. Even the great Anthony Bourdain couldn't resist the allure of pre-distressed clothing (the Kenneth Cole jacket we spoke about earlier came distressed as well, by the way). He would, of course, go on to develop his own layer of patina on them with regular wear, donning this pair frequently in 2017 and 2018.
The other boots he was most photographed in were the Boulets. A classic cowboy staple, Boulet was the first company to introduce Western boots in Canada in the 60s (Bourdain definitely had a favourite period in fashion). This model, the Boulet 1828, has a J-shaped toe and leather soles. The zigzag leaf-like stitches are a nod to traditional bootmaking practices of the 1880s, when leaf and three-point stitches were added to ensure that the shaft of the boot didn't wear with regular use.
Bourdain wouldn't wear them as often as his Clarks, but he had them for years, it seems. The first time the boots made an appearance was in California in 2010 for a feature with The Guardian. He would don them again in the final season of Parts Unknown in 2018, for an episode that took him to Texas.
In his own words, Anthony Bourdain dressed “for the worst-case scenario”; he used to carry a lightweight jacket everywhere in case he ever had to sleep on the floor. He would wear sandals when the situation called for it, or a rugged pair of Meindl’s when the day required climbing rocky mountainsides. But these simple pieces, that even your average bloke would wear, would be a story of their own: mute characters that appeared and reappeared across his shows, earning layers of patina and frays with each passing episode. After all, what better way can there be to personalise an outfit than to wear it down to its last shreds?