When Brands Need a Truly Wild Shoe, They Hire This Man
The New York Times
Shoes with teeth. Shoes with soles at right angles. Shoes made from two shoes. Shintaro Yamamoto is the footwear Dr. Frankenstein behind them all.
Like the tagline of a horror movie, the shoes … had teeth.
At the Japanese label Doublet’s fashion show in Paris this January, models tramped out in dress shoes with their toes angled upward, like the ajar maw of a bass at feeding time. At the top and bottom of this flapping cavity were puny metallic teeth. Inside, the surface was polished tongue red.
“Monster shoes” is how Shintaro Yamamoto, the designer of these wide-mouth wonders, described them. (They looked, to my eyes, like infant-scaled versions of the sandworms from “Beetlejuice.”)
Mr. Yamamoto, 50, of Tokyo, is the footwear Dr. Frankenstein behind the most form-shattering, smirk-inducing dress shoes in recent memory. In collaboration with Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, he has made derbies with two uppers stacked on top of each other, like a double-decker bus, and combat boots with toes pointed straight up in the air at perfect 90-degree angles.
At his own label, Kids Love Gaite, he has made shoes with white skeleton bones painted on the cap and ones with an extra leather sliver sandwiched in the sole and protruding out the front, like a curled-up tongue.
“These days, I always think I don’t have to be in the orthodox style,” said Mr. Yamamoto, who started Kids Love Gaite in 2008. “I can think more free.”
