I bought my first pair of Chelsea boots when I was 16. It was my junior year of high school, and the soundtrack to my life was a chorus of 1960s British Invasion — The Beatles and The Yardbirds, mainly. I barely had any real sense of my personal style, but if I was sure of one thing, it was that all my favorite bands wore really cool black ankle boots. My second pair came when I was 20, on a trip to Northampton, England — long after the soles of the first had moldered into dust. I had a firmer grasp of my relationship to clothes by then, but I still found the Chelsea to be an elusive piece of footwear that I could never quite figure out how to work into my wardrobe. Then, on the night before my 23rd birthday, a shoebox arrived by express mail, all the way from Australia. Inside was a pair of black Macquarie boots from R.M. Williams, the century-old maker of the world’s finest Chelseas. This was my third pair of Chelsea boots, and I can still remember holding them in my hands for the first time — light as air, sleek as a stooping raptor — enchanted like Keats standing before the Elgin Marbles. I put them on, and felt as if I’d finally found some lost key to a door I’d first attempted to pass through seven years prior. I am 35 now, and those same boots are still the first shoes I reach for whether I’m wearing black jeans and a T-shirt or a dark navy suit. Over more than a decade, they have become such an integral part of my wardrobe that last year, I ordered a new, identical pair to wear at my wedding.