Like a catchphrase in a horror movie, the shoes had teeth.
At the fashion show for Japanese label Doublet in Paris in January this year, the model stomped with dress shoes with the toe angle raised, like the base Ajar Maw when feeding. There were plenty of metal teeth at the top and bottom of this flapping cavity. Inside, the surface was polished to the red tongue.
“Monster Shoes” is the way Yamamoto Shimamoto, the incredible designer of these broad mouths, explained them. (They looked in my eyes like a toddler version of the sandworm of “Beetlejuice.”
Yamamoto, 50, from Tokyo, is Dr. Frankenstein's footwear behind the most shattered, smashed, tempting dress shoes in recent memory. In his collaboration with Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, he slowly stacked two uppers like two double basses, with toes facing straight at a perfect 90-degree angle and stacked up combat boots.
On his own label, Kids Love Gate, he made shoes with white skeleton bones on his hat, covered with excess leather slivers stuck between the soles, protruding from the front like a curled tongue.
“I've always thought that I don't have to be an orthodox style these days,” said Yamamoto, who started watching Gaite in 2008.
The quest for freedom was a general motif in Yamamoto's life. As a teenager, his parents sent him to a boarding school in the southern part of England. It didn't suit him, so he dropped out and wandered to London. There, I was engrossed in the work of John Moore, a shoe designer who started a short-lived, highly cultivated beauty and culture home in the late 1980s. As it was known, the Hobac's exterior was very wandering chic.
Moore's shoes were hard soles, with straps shot down and toes shot as if they had been chopped up by a flesh rift. They shattered eloquent practices about what shoes should look like.
Mr. Yamamoto arrived in London after Moore's death in 1989, but he fell with Daita Kimura, a cobbler of Moore's spirit. Yamamoto supported Kimura in his shop and studied trade before returning to Tokyo in 2000.
Back in Tokyo, Yamamoto eventually began making his own shoes for the Japanese market along with his children's LoveGight. In a video interview from his office in Tokyo, he said he was swooped down rockabilly hair and grey hair, surrounded by posters for Sex Pistols and posters for British Art Duo Gilbert & George.
In doing so, it led to some mysterious wild shoes. His design portfolio captures a man constantly asking, “Why not?”
The doubled shoes he invented for Comme des Garçons came to him after seeing a label shirt with two sleeves waving around on either side. Why did he want to do the same with his shoes?
The L-Angle Combat Boot, featured in a collection entitled “War Is Hell,” was a way of representing combat boots that met its final mise. (It also nodded to his rounded roots. The square technique of the boot came from John Moore's pig toe shoes.
“I was impressed by the way he could take two-dimensional sketches on paper and turn them into a very perfect three-dimensional object,” Doublet's designer Masayuki wrote in an email. He has worked with Yamamoto on designing two shoes.
Oshima said that Yamamoto gave “only one small idea” and that the shoemaker drove his imagination. Regarding tooth shoes, Masayuki was thinking about the horror film “how everyday objects like jeans, refrigerators and condoms grow fangs and attack people.” Yamamoto had the skill to turn this competitive concept into a lastable commercial product.
“He is constantly evolving, respecting the tradition of leather shoes,” Masayuki said.
Yamamoto's strange collaborations are at least partly hand-crafted. To produce doublet tooth shoes, the upper “jaw” had to be hand-sewn to keep open at all times. Early iterations of the design are also hand-made.
That handiwork means high prices. The double Derby sold for $2,700. A pair of regular (read: not two, not one toe) kids are selling Guy Race Up for around $700. The collaboration took his business to a new level.
After seeing his job at Comme des Garçons, the client realized that Yamamoto specializes in regular shoes. And what shoppers want, like it's not normal. He recently took his shoes to Paris for the first time and sold them inside, and he said the reaction was stronger than he could have imagined.
After all, after letting his imagination run freely, Yamamoto probably came to consider his shoes as traditional. When asked how he described what he had made, he said, “I would say leather shoes.”
He is right – even if they have teeth and two shoes in one. The shoes are still shoes.
