Gravitation

Nienke van Dee

The third collection, named Gravitation, relates with the battle of human kind to beat gravity. This theme is about heavy materials, hard, mass, firm and weathered. I’ve used an unfinished material within the leather tanning process, the so called ‘wetblue’. This material owes his name to the blue color and its wet condition. Constructing and folding multiple layers of wet blue, which after drying, results in a shoe with a hard armor.

Part of the final collection ENCAPSULATED, 2013. This collection exists of 3 different approaches: Hypogravity, Reinforce and Gravitation. A research project on new forms for women’s shoes. It is based on visualizations of a future in which space travel is a common practice. Space age visualization as a genre has its roots in modernist tradition – take for example the work of fashion designer André Courrège – but is still very much alive today. After collecting and studying this kind of image material my next step was to translate certain of its characteristics into a set of constructions, materials and ways of detailing for women’s shoes.

© Nienke van Dee


© 2024 Virtual Shoe Museum