Travel is back with a bang and destination-just about- anywhere involving the sweet combination of planes, trains and/or automobiles feels like paradise. Wherever and whatever, from fully fledged great escapes to working weekend mini-breaks, fresh access to these formerly forbidden horizons is best honoured with a sartorial reset. One of the very best brands in this space is the British footwear label Mulo. Not least because its very first shoe, a much-finessed reboot of the humble jute-and-canvas backstreet espadrille known as the alpargata, was conceived on the high seas after its founder bought a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires in search of a serious life change and a more intrepid variety of inspiration. A more apt origin story you’d be hard pushed to find.

Coming up on a decade in business but hovering just the right side of “under-the-radar” to still be considered a cachet label for those in the know, it was co-founded by London-based Tobias Cox, a former management consultant obsessed with the minutiae of iconic product design. Disillusioned with corporate life and desperate to rekindle his creative ideas, he made a clean break for it, ‘ripping off the metaphorical Band-Aid’ by buying a ticket for one to Argentina.

Foldable suede loafers, 195. All Mulo

Once there, surrounded by alpargatas, sold for centuries on every corner, he was captivated by the challenge of evolving such a rich piece of design history into something fully fit for modern use – ie durable, desirable and sustainable (a mantra he’s been applying to every perfectly pared-back piece of footwear since).

Four weeks in, an adventure-of-a-lifetime opportunity arose to participate in a sailing trip, landing Cox in a four-man crew of virtual strangers sailing across the Atlantic, from Antigua to Spain in a 34ft family boat. The trip was as wild and wonderful as you’d hope. Cox describes moments of extreme trepidation (‘I remember watching the mainland of Saint Martin, our last island-hop before beginning the transatlantic crossing, disappear into the distance and having a heavy sense that was no turning back’); abject fear (‘looking up at the mast, which was reeling like spaghetti, I felt we were doomed’); but also liberated (‘with no contact with the outside world I had this sense of being entirely released from the pressures of day-to-day life, which gave me the luxury of getting lost in thought, no distractions, where I thought about “the shoe”’). It’s the ideal travel companion: smart, but so supple it can easily be stored away in-transit On returning, he went to Central Saint Martins to study footwear design and the rest is Mulo history. It’s a legacy where the kind of versatility inextricable from a travel-loving life remains paramount, evidenced succinctly in its newest design – a foldable loafer, a derivative of the traditional English loafer in butter-soft suede but rendered in a more casual slip-on silhouette. It’s the ideal travel companion: smart enough to take a serious meeting in, followed by a drink in the bar, but so supple it can easily be stowed away in-transit.

There’s also the singularly brilliant desert boot, which builds on the classic suede style originally created in the 1940s for British Army officers serving in the sands of then-Burma. It’s been updated with an Italian white “cassetta” sole, leather sidewall trims, waxed cotton laces and the inclusion of very discreet sportswear engineering to provide extra comfort without diluting the classic design cues.

Fuelled by the rush and the risk of that seminal adventure, although not that you’d know it from their easygoing vibe, it’s footwear for getting back on the road. Or train, boat, yacht…

muloshoes.com