Filip Arickx, cofounder of Belgian fashion label A.F. Vandevorst, confessed on Wednesday that he hadn’t heard of the viral hashtag BootsOnlySummer .

Meanwhile, he certainly had one.

Five years after shuttering the brand he cofounded with his partner An Vandevorst, he decided to relaunch its chunky X010 boot style, which was nearly an instant hit when it debuted in 2000, and remained a perennial bestseller until the brand shuttered in 2020, selling up to 3,000 units per season.

But what was initially conceived as a one-shot project for diehard fans of the X010 quickly snowballed into a return to wholesaling, with about 20 specialty stores signing up — some reordering even before the first shipments, now under way.

“We wanted to create a boot that was in between a horse-riding boot and

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