The Beauty in the Archive Exhibition. Paraboot x Universal Works x Truss Archive.

24.10.2025

The Beauty in the Archive exhibition will run until the 7th November 2025 at our Coal Drops Yard store in London.

Unit 30 Coal Drops Yard
London N1C 4DQ
+44 (0)20 8036 3352

We just launched our exciting collaboration with French shoemakers Paraboot, and to mark the occasion, we held a party in our Coal Drops Yard store. We also opened an accompanying exhibition—put together by our friends at Truss Archive—“The Beauty in the Archive”.

This brings together the Universal Works archive and Paraboot’s history of shoemaking, exploring a shared belief in process, material and human touch, delving deeper on the theme explored in the collaboration, the idea of the beauty in imperfection—or La Beauté Dans L’Imperfection.

The exhibition celebrates clothing and footwear that carry their history through age, wear, and care. Each has a story—a memory—attached to it, whether found hunting in vintage stores in Japan, sent by an old friend from America, or stored by Paraboot for over a hundred years. It tells our story and Paraboot’s through the lens of these pieces, looking at the history that led to the collaboration we have created today, and to who we are as brands.

Included in the exhibition are both vintage finds that inspire our current collections, and original UW styles. Alongside, there are archive Paraboots, some from as early as the 1920s, and a selection from our Co-Founder David Keyte’s notebooks. Filled with notes and sketches from his travels, these show how an idea can develop into a future classic, and how inspiration can come from anywhere.