I was immediately attracted to these stunning shoes from Award winning London based architect Julian Hakes.
“One late summer night in the studio I was thinking about the design of shoes in general.
I wondered why there was the need for a foot plate in shoes such as high heels. When I look at a foot
print in the sand it is very clear to see that the main force goes to the heel and ball, even more so in a
heeled shoe.
By standing on a wooden block the foot naturally ’spans’ the gap to the floor. The foot has its own
inbuilt strength and support so why duplicate this? You would not have a jumper with rigid arms
between elbow and wrist.
So this raised the question: if the design of a shoe was an evolution of the early sandal, can new
materials and design techniques provide a new solution?
So I set to exploring this question in a similar way to how I would design a bridge, examining the
forces and looking at the most simple, elegant yet poetic expression of the forces at play within the
materials used.
The result of this process was Hakes Mojito – we named it this as it was rather like a twist of lime
peel. It is a unique shoe design concept, a single wrapped geometry which starts under the ball of
the foot, sweeps over the bridge, then down below the heel before twisting back on itself to provide
the support for the heel and ankle.
