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| Photography by Lucas Seidenfaden |
Looking at Victoria Spruce’s sculptural footwear
it’s hard to tell where the heel ends and the shoe begins; where the upper
becomes the sole. Fluid lines in plastic and leather create continuity, a
constant. It is as if the shoe were made of water, flowing into a dramatic
curved heel.
The soft blues, creams, and lilacs of the
collection add a dreaminess and complement the organic design. The hard shiny
plastic and supple leather could have sent the footwear into a dark fetish
realm, an issue Victoria was aware of.
"I’m always drawn to subtle colours, and I
was conscious of the fact I was using hard plastic – I needed something to tone
it down.” Victoria, a Royal College of Art graduate,
told me how she was initially inspired by ceramic sculptures she stumbled
across on the Internet. As if controlled by fate, she found the sculptures
again in a college exhibition, and decided then to allow herself be inspired by
them.
The fluid, continuous aesthetic came about
in the initial stages of the design process.
“I started playing around with bits of
paper on the foot, and I thought why does the heel have to be separated, why
doesn’t the whole thing evolve as one?”
The subtle futurism of Victoria’s designs
was achieved using 3D printing and graphic prototyping, and she felt it was important
to combine her knowledge of traditional footwear design with these modern
techniques.
The ethereal collection has garnered
Victoria attention with all the right people, and has encouraged her to push it
further, to put herself under the spotlight she deserves. “The amount of
interest it’s generating at the moment, I’ve got to go with it. I really want
to develop these for production.”