A Boot Collector Feature
The rhinestone-suit tailor who dressed Elvis, Hank Williams, and Elton John ran a North Hollywood shop that built hand-tooled boots right alongside its famous suits.
Nudie Cohn was born Nutya Kotlyrenko in Kiev in 1902 and began apprenticing as a tailor at age eight. At eleven, his parents sent him alone to America to escape anti-Jewish persecution in Czarist Russia; a customs agent at Ellis Island misheard "Nutya" and the nickname "Nudie" stuck for life. He and his wife Bobbie launched Nudie's for the Ladies in Manhattan in 1934, making rhinestone-adorned costumes for chorus performers, before relocating to Los Angeles in the 1940s and finding a new audience among the western swing musicians they met at local venues. In 1950, the Cohns opened Nudie's Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood — a storefront that became legendary in its own right, employing bootmakers, leather workers, embroiderers, and tailors, including designers who went on to their own fame, Manuel Cuevas and Jaime Castaneda among them. Some of the boots worn with Nudie’s suits came from outside bootmakers too: Charlie Garrison, Roy Rogers’ bootmaker, made boots for Nudie and for his wife, Bobbie.
The "Nudie suit" — an elaborately embroidered, rhinestone-covered Western outfit that became a status symbol in country music after Cohn met Lefty Frizzell in 1951 and built on Frizzell's enthusiasm for rhinestone embellishment. Clients included Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Porter Wagoner, and Elton John. Boots built at the shop carried the same hand-tooled attention to detail — Hank Williams owned a pair with his initials tooled into the shafts, and Jim Reeves wore Nudie's-made boots in the 1950s.
A rhinestone-suit legend whose shop dressed country music from the boots up.
Pairs from smaller, custom, or long-closed makers rarely come up for sale, so this search may not find anything. It’s worth checking back now and then.