Klaus Märtens was twenty-five, recovering from a broken foot in postwar Munich, when he decided the standard-issue hard leather sole was making his recovery worse. He salvaged a cobbler's last, cut up old tires, and hand-built himself an air-cushioned sole to walk on instead. He showed the prototype to a university friend, a mechanical engineer named Herbert Funk, and the two of them went into business using leftover military supplies. For the first decade, the shoes barely touched a subculture. They sold mostly to older German women who liked the cushioning.
In 1959 the pair placed an advertisement in a trade magazine, hoping to find distributors overseas. A British bootmaker named Bill Griggs, whose family had been making sturdy work boots in Northamptonshire since 1901, spotted it, licensed the sole, and reworked the design: rounder toe, yellow welt stitching, a two-tone grooved sole edge, a heel loop reading AirWair. The boot went into production on April 1, 1960, and was named after that date. It sold for two pounds to postmen, factory workers, and police, and for a few years it was exactly what it looked like, a practical, unglamorous work boot.
What happened next wasn't planned by anyone at the company. Early skinheads, a multiracial scene built around ska and Jamaican rude boy style, adopted the boot as an emblem of working-class pride. Pete Townshend started wearing them on stage with The Who. Through the seventies the boot got passed along an unbroken chain of British subcultures that otherwise had nothing in common, glam, punk, two-tone, goth, each one taking the same eight-eye silhouette and making it mean something different. The Sex Pistols and The Clash cemented it as punk's default footwear. By the eighties, a faction of skinhead culture had curdled into something openly racist and appropriated the boot alongside it, a genuinely ugly chapter that the boot's actual wearers, mostly still anti-fascist, spent years pushing back against through lace codes and open confrontation with the people trying to claim their look.
The boot kept moving. American hardcore bands touring the UK brought pairs home in the eighties. Grunge picked it up in the nineties, Britpop wore the same boots while rejecting grunge's whole ethos, nu-metal and early emo kept it going into the 2000s. Then the wheels nearly came off entirely: by the early 2000s sales had collapsed so badly that Dr. Martens closed every UK factory but one to avoid going under. High fashion designers reinterpreting the 1460 pulled it back from the edge, and by 2007 the original Cobbs Lane factory in Northampton was making Dr. Martens Originals again, the same production line Klaus Märtens' invention had ended up on sixty years after he first laced up his own prototype.
That factory still runs today, making about one percent of all 1460s sold, priced at a real premium over the mass-produced version, for people who specifically want a boot built where the boot was born. The company around it is having a harder time than the boot itself, though: revenue's been sliding, leadership has turned over twice in two years, and the brand marked its 65th anniversary in 2025 with a limited run of exactly 1,460 pairs rather than a victory lap. It's a strange position for an object this permanent to be in, a design that has outlasted every single subculture that ever claimed it, sitting inside a business that isn't guaranteed to outlast the design.
