Putting the boot in

Wherever Hong Kong fashion steps next it will surely have a pair of Dr Martens on its feet.

Half-shoe, half-Cornish pasty, the Doc or DM has famously been the sole of every wild, finger-flicking fad in Britain since the '60s. From being an integral part of skinhead culture (whose steel-toed, oxblood, 20-hole boots had not been christened until smeared with enemy body fluids) to glam rock (when Elton John rode five-foot boots mounted on stilts) through punk, new wave, new romantic, rap and finally hip-hop, it has become part of the fabric of Western youth culture.

Now it is becoming apparent that Hong Kong's youth culture is tied to its Docs just as tightly. Any MTR anthropologist or Causeway Bay fashion watcher will tell you DMs are breaking out everywhere. Like a dose of athlete's foot, they do not respect the boundaries of gender, age or social class. This year, they have padded the catwalks in collections by William Tang, Flora Cheong-Leen and other local designers. And they have stomped across the concert and television shows of a string of Canto-pop fashion fuhrers. As a result, they have crept into the shoe cupboards of socialites' lofty Peak duplexes and the wardrobes of angst-ridden Yau Ma Tei teenagers.

It all began about four years ago. Then, the basic black, three-eyelet Gibson shoe and eight-hole boot blew into Hong Kong with the fad for Storm and Boy London, leather and steel briefcases, white t-shirts and black Levi's. As their popularity grew, so did the number of people importing rare and customised varieties from London's Red or Dead boutiques. Hong Kong's main distributor, Style Dimension, began to get requests for Dr Martens of all shapes, sizes and designs such as tartan, silver, gold, rainbow and even transparent polythene.

''Part of the fun of owning Docs is building your collection,'' said fashion designer William Tang, who has 12 pairs. He has a point. Of 18 DM wearers canvassed in Causeway Bay last week, all had more than one pair and eight had more than four pairs. ''I love them,'' said Tse Pick-wai, 19. ''They are bouncy, comfortable, not too expensive and they make me look taller.'' Such is the hold of DMs on local culture that Hong Kong rap artists Soft Hard Whiz Kids wrote a song about their popularity (some 20 years after Pete Townshend of The Who). ''DMs have become one of the totems of local teen fashion,'' says lyricist Jan Lamb, 26. ''We wanted to make a song about mindless youth consumerism and were looking for a product that expressed it - we thought of Levi's, Mandarin Duck, Swatch - and then we thought, 'Aha, Dr Martens'. We believe that DMs have a pretty unshakeable hold inHong Kong now.'' (Interestingly, Jan himself has only one pair of Dr Martens which he bought by mail order from London in 1989. He says: ''I don't even wear them now - I hate following trends.'') This year, Griggs, the British company which makes DMs, finally acquired the aggressive attitude of its skinhead clients. ''We have got really focused on Asia,'' said Griggs' marketing director Gail Devereux Batchelor. ''We are cracking down on Hong Kong copies [as good as its word, Griggs recently seized 3,000 pairs from a Kowloon warehouse and donated them to Bosnian refugees] and we are introducing a much wider range - especially for girls.'' Ah yes, girls. With shoes and boots now available in smaller sizes and with higher heels, girls under 25 have become DMs' most visible patrons. Not only do their numbers seem to be huge but the looks they are creating with Dr Martens are striking.

''There is something very sexy about women in dresses and boots,'' says William Tang. ''It creates a kind of sexual cocktail - a mix of masculine and feminine.'' With patrons as diverse as Andy Lau, Princess Diana, Chow Yun-fatt, Sandy Lam, Ronnie Yip, the Pope, the British police force, Sting, the girl who works behind Sogo's Chanel counter and anyone who ever stepped onto a construction site, Hong Kong's fashion leaders have only to slip into a pair of DMs to call on a wealth of associations. As one of the people canvassed in Causeway Bay said: ''Dr Martens, man, they're going to run and run.''