Paraboot and Universal Works Return with a Lighter

The Thiers has always lived at that sweet spot between boat shoe and city derby, casual enough to wear on cobblestones but structured enough to mean business. Paraboot first built the silhouette as a "sport/ville" shoe, named after the French city, and it carried that utility-with-polish energy for decades. For their second collaboration, Paraboot and Universal Works founder David Keyte took that same shape and stripped it down: unlined construction, Blake stitching instead of the brand's signature Norwegian welt, and a natural leather that shows both its smooth grain side and its textured suede-like reverse. The result, which dropped on March 26, is genuinely lighter in hand and on foot than anything Paraboot typically produces.

The two colorways, coffee and sand, landed at €370 and are available through Paraboot's website, their Paris boutiques on Grenelle, Rivoli, and Saint-Honoré, as well as in Bordeaux, Lille, and through Universal Works directly. Each pair carries a debossed "La Beauté Dans L'Imperfection," the collaboration's tagline and a quiet argument against the flawless, machine-finished aesthetic that dominates most footwear at this price point. The removable kiltie fringe is the one piece of styling drama here, and it earns its place; pull it off and the shoe reads clean and prep-adjacent, leave it on and it shifts toward something warmer, more considered.

Keyte's fingerprints are all over the clothing capsule that accompanied the drop, available exclusively through Universal Works. The centerpiece is the Warmus jacket, the name drawn from an old English term for a work coat, made in cotton twill with a collaborative illustration lifted from a 1960s Paraboot advertisement on the back. The phrase stamped across that graphic, "Manufacture De Chaussures Extra," and another vintage slogan, "Il n'y a plus de kilomètres" (there are no kilometres), run through the capsule as a visual thread, also appearing on printed tees in navy and ecru, a Super Chino jacket and pants in cotton poplin, and a cambric cotton bandana. It is a small wardrobe, built for the season and coherent without being matchy.

This is the second collaboration between the two labels; the first centered on Paraboot's Michael derby and established the working relationship between Keyte, who has worn Paraboots since buying his first pair of Michaels forty years ago, and the family-run French factory in Saint-Jean-de-Moirans. "It's about people," Keyte has said of what made the partnership function. "That's what made it work." On the Thiers specifically, he described it as "that kind of city-boat shoe for me," comfortable enough for distance, composed enough for a city block.

At €370 the Thiers sits at a meaningful premium over Paraboot's standard production, but the unlined Blake construction actually represents a deliberate step away from the house's heaviest techniques, not an upgrade to justify the price. What you are paying for is the dual-face leather, the collaborative context, and a shoe that gets better the less carefully you treat it, which is exactly the point the debossed tagline makes every time you take them off.