A Brief, Scholarly (and Partially Unhinged) History
Jarius and Josepho Lament—uncle and nephew, outcasts and visionaries—were banished from London for crimes against music so egregious, and so profoundly offensive, that they nearly caused the collapse of polite society.
Despite the remarkable unpopularity of their creative output, they insisted on staging concerts at least four nights a week. Their compositions, deemed simultaneously too subversive and too earnest, created a pure vortex of revulsion, culminating in an armed riot. King William IV, and his wife Princess Adelaide declared their ballads "an existential threat to decency," and upon issuance of their death warrant, Jarius and Josepho were forced to flee under cover of darkness, stowing away on a merchant vessel laden with three tons of scotch eggs and mince pies bound for the South African colonies.
Unfortunately, Josepho—a man of ungovernable appetites—developed a taste for mince pies and, despite Jarius’ best efforts, devoured such an inordinate amount of delectable British delicacies that the merchants discovered the men’s presence and hurled them overboard into the shark-infested abyss. The two survived for three wretched days at sea, floating upon a bloated barrel of curdled clotted cream. Though they would not in the years that followed speak of it freely, it is believed they experienced a remarkable spiritual awakening during this time, some kind of visitation both enlightening and terrifying, one born of salt water, hard sun, and multiple creatures of the depth. Finally, a duo shrouded in absolute mystery, they washed ashore the remote island of Câmara de Lobos, Portugal.
Here, they flourished.
The Rise and Inevitable Cataclysmic Fall of the Laments
Jarius, a lifelong devotee of oddities both natural and profoundly unnatural, established one of the world's most comprehensive Cabinets of Curiosities, which soon became the pre-eminent attraction of its kind in all of Portugal. His collection of stuffed sloths alone was renowned worldwide—so exquisite in its grotesque detail that President Andrew Jackson, villain though he was, openly wept upon beholding it (and even, it is said, briefly considered halting his many atrocious policies.)
Josepho, a man of profound literary obsessions (despite being wholly illiterate), created a library of unprecedented breadth, brimming with first editions, ancient texts, and books so esoteric they defied standard comprehension. Scholars from across the globe journeyed to see it, all so desperate to witness such wonders that they risked the dangerous journey to the remote island. Many died in transit.
Despite this unprecedented success, as is often the case in history, hubris proved the Lament’s undoing. Despite this grand success, and being proprietors of what worldwide publications at the time would declare to be the 13th and 17th greatest tourist attraction on the whole island of Câmara de Lobos, the familiar and persistent itch to perform their reviled music returned. They erected a grand and towering amphitheater in the middle of town to finally realize their long-awaited artistic resurrection.
The debut concert was an unmitigated disaster.
The Portuguese, it turned out, found their music even more nauseatingly offensive than the Londoners, which hardly seemed possible. The amphitheater was set ablaze before the encore, their palatial houses seized at gunpoint, their reputations torched, their golden locks shorn from their heads, and their bodies tarred and feathered. With what little remained of their dwindling fortune, they chartered a boat to Morocco.
The Birth of a Shoemaking Empire (From Sheer Necessity and Hideous Feet)
In Morocco, farthing-less and desperate, the Laments found themselves without shelter, without food, and embarrassingly enough, without shoes. This was particularly catastrophic, as both men suffered from a breathtakingly wide variety of podiatriacal maladies — hammertoes, ingrown toenails, bunions, corns, blisters, and fungal horrors of unspeakable magnitudes. The sheer intensity and breadth of their foot ailments were so abhorrent to behold that onlookers who caught even the slightest glance of them from afar would either be overwhelmed by a bitter tears, or explode into a violent fit of nausea-laced vomiting.
Faced with imminent arrest for public indecency of the foot, the Laments reached desperation in their need to learn the art of shoemaking, but their bedraggled and downtrodden appearance kept them out of the world famous, prestigious Cobbler Academies of Morocco.
In typical Lament fashion, at this darkest moment, a miracle in serpentine form manifested. While trying to find fitful sleep on the hard cobblestone, both Jarius and Josepho experienced a curious sensation, and accused the other of tickling their legs, as both were at times understandably wont to do. Instead, to their horror, they discovered that a pair of most lethal and irritable vipers had entwined themselves around them, seemingly and perversely attracted to their defiled feet.
Despite a flurry of extended fangs and snapping jaws, the Laments managed to escape down a dark alleyway without harm. Yet the determined vipers pursued them, undeterred, with dogged persistence. The Laments stayed just a hair’s breadth ahead of the serpents’ venom-packed strikes, turning left and right in a fruitless effort to lose them for good.
Finally, the furious vipers cornered the Laments in a dead end, a pit which served as the city’s dump, chock full of odious and decaying horrors. Given the choice between death by snakebite and death by trash, they fell back into the bog of disgusting refuse, only to land by divine (or serpentine) providence on a pile of recently discarded scraps of cloth and leather, on books of ancient shoemaking wisdom, on master cobblers’ handwritten notes and arcane blueprints.
It is said the snakes themselves taught the men the art of shoes, and who are we to argue with this claim, for how else to explain what came next?
For lo, the Laments were shoe-making geniuses.
Perhaps it was the wisdom of the vipers. Or perhaps, it was because, as is well known, none need shoes so much as those with hideous feet, an none understand shoes more profoundly than the man who had suffered so deeply by their absence. Either way, the Laments related to their craft on an essential, existential, and foundational level.
Their creations were shoes of unparalleled comfort and beauty, soft yet sturdy, elegant yet durable, delightful to the heel, the arch, the toe, and pleasing to the eye. Soon all of Morocco, and even those beyond, clamored for their wares. Night and day they would make shoes, and still the ravenous appetite for their products could not not be satiated. Their once-humble back-alley workshop grew into a market spanning three city blocks, and they had become the largest employer in all of Northern Africa.
Born of their earlier obsessions with natural oddities and literary references, their designs were beloved for their peculiar embellishments—marked by animals, or characters from famous books, or by a vast variety of other delightfully cryptic symbols.
In 1835, they christened their ever-expanding empire Jaded Lament, which was also the name of their earlier reviled musical act, forever hoping that their prosperous financial empire could one day help them realize their creative dreams.
The Final Performance (And Mercifully, The Final End)
Flush with wealth and power, it wasn’t long before the performing bug bit them again, and the Laments made one final, catastrophic error— they summoned the Sultan of Morocco, using their considerable economic clout to compel him into enduring a private performance of their music.
This was a colossal miscalculation.
Their music proved to be no more popular in Morocco then it had been in England and Portugal, and, you could argue it was somehow more hated, for they did not even reach the third verse of their second song before being seized and imprisoned, their music so unspeakably abhorrent that an angry mob broke into the jail and put an end to their misery, the only appropriate revenge the mob could imagine for ever having to hear Jaded Lament’s music.
Thus ended the saga of Jarius and Josepho Lament—martyrs to artistic delusion, but immortalized in shoe leather.
The Legacy Continues
Now, nearly 200 years later, the descendants of Jarius and Josepho Lament, the “keepers of the flame,” as we like to christen ourselves, have unearthed their secret shoemaking techniques, their long-lost hand-drawn blueprints, their accursed musical compositions, and the unbreakable entrepreneurial spirit that made Jaded Lament an empire.
This once-legendary emporium of unparalleled footwear has returned—reborn with dazzling digital resplendency in the modern age.
Buy a pair of shoes and see what all the fuss is about.
(And if you’re lucky, perhaps one day we’ll play you some of their music.)