A shoe revolution is upon us

The ubiquitous Zaha Hadid is the most visible architect to have entered the shoe cupboard recently. Last September, the Pritzker prize-winner designed some enticing and affordable plastic shoes for Brazilian footwear brand Melissa, which by now most fashionable London girls must have tried on, if not bought.

This summer Hadid has collaborated with Lacoste in a limited-edition Italian calf-leather boot (purple calf-high for women, grey ankle-high for men). Available from today exclusively from Colette in Paris, they hug the foot and spiral up the leg with Hadid's signature fragmented perspective. Priced at £358 and decorated with a relief print, they're a cross between a butter-soft boot and a Max Escher spiral.

Yves Behar was probably the first product designer to go into footwear, with his garden clogs for Birkenstock in 2003. Behar and his team at Fuseproject in San Francisco made a funky urban shoe with a cork construction, suede lining and TechnoGel in the heel. Normally they design furniture, lighting and other products.

Then early last year, John Lobb asked Doshi Levien to design the Apprentice Collection — post-modern brogues by this husband-and-wife design duo best known for sofas called My Beautiful Backside and tableware for Habitat.

The Spanish neo-baroque star designer Jaime Hayon has also been seduced away from his customary porcelain and crystal into designing shoes. In September last year, Camper launched Hayon's soft men's leather shoes in jaunty colours like custard and fuchsia. Sporty, with a distinct elegance and a whiff of the music hall, there's an archetypal quality to this nonchalant shoe.

French designer Paul Coudamy, normally found remodelling office spaces, wowed the design world last December with thought-provoking shoes called Woodwalk for the tennis shoe company K-Swiss. A conceptual fusion between urban trainer and 19th-century Swiss country clog, the limited edition of 25 pairs, hand sculpted in wood, invites us to reconsider urban lifestyles and walking in the city.

Even legendary Dutch architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas has been hard at work making shoes, with the seventh-generation shoemaker Galahad Clark. Their United Nude brand of women's shoes with cantilevered architectural heels is a wild success.

So far so interesting, but when is a shoe not a shoe but something completely new? Marloes ten Bhömer, a 30-year-old Dutch product designer based in Shoreditch, is boldly going stratospheric with shoes that are revolutionary in shape, construction and materials.

Ten Bhömer studied 3D design in Arnhem and under Ron Arad at the Royal College of Art. A versatile designer, she is fascinated with the shoe, which she sees as a structural object. "To innovate you need to be more like a product designer than a fashion designer," she says.

Up to now, her shoes have been unwearable deconstructions made of wood, tarpaulin, fibreglass or resin. "Functionality is not important in the design approach," she says. Now she has set out to make these provocative and otherworldly creations wearable, and the curator Andrée Cooke at Spring Projects Gallery has wasted no time in giving her a platform to launch them. This is dangerous news for London's shoe lovers currently trying to be sensible with their spending.

Andrée Cooke is a legendary talent-spotter who commissioned designer Tord Boontje's first "Wednesday" collection, and gave early shows to artists Gillian Wearing and Mark Wallanger. "I'm showing young product and fashion designers because design massively influences the fine-art sphere," she says. "I've been interested in Marloes ten Bhömer since the Royal College. She's one of our rising talents, fascinating and brilliant."

On a balmy evening last week, Spring Projects presented Bhömer's Beigefoldedshoe — an astonishing, highly wearable piece of origami, created from a single piece of untanned leather folded around a stainless-steel heel. They were presented along with photographs of their construction and three abstract videos on the subject of walking and adorning parts of the body.

The designer is thrilled. "To establish something in London really means something. There's like a gold rush in design here at the moment." She and an assistant will make every pair that are ordered through her website or through Spring Projects. It's a painstakingly couture process, which means that these shoes are expensive — £2,250 inc worldwide delivery.

But who cares if you blow your budget for a couple of seasons in one go? A girl needs to make a statement no matter what. Frankly you could wear these shoes with an old sack and you're dressed.

www.springprojects.co.uk
020 7428 7117, info@springprojects.co.uk
www.marloestenbhomer.