Laces are threaded through the uppers of these shoes by Japanese designers Nendo for Spanish shoe company Camper, creating patterns across the whole surface (+ slideshow).
Nendo set out to create a lighter, more water-resistant version of Camper‘s bestselling Peu Ideal shoe, which features a stretchy lace secured with a knot at each end.
“We lit upon the idea of working with Camper’s iconic stretchable shoelaces and knots,” explained Nendo.
Available in four colours, the Beetle uses elastic laces to perforate the shoe across the entire upper, tied in knots at three points to keep them in place.
“In our design, shoelaces interlaced across the shoe’s upper provide comfort and wearability, at the same time as they take on a starring role, bringing new function and visual style alike,” the designers added.
Making the shoes from a combination of nylon and polyurethane, Nendo has added further waterproofing and made the shoe lighter than the original.
The sole also features thermal insulation and is inscribed with the words “Human Energy”.
The studio plans to exhibit the shoes in Milan next month during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, which runs from 8 to 13 April. The shoes are also available on Camper’s website.
This isn’t the first time the two companies have collaborated together: last year Nendo designed the brand’s flagship New York store featuring more than a thousand ghostly white shoes protruding from the walls.
Movie: Miguel Fluxá, head of shoe brand Camper, says the company’s use of high-profile designers for its stores is more about brand-building than making money in this movie filmed at the opening of the latest New York store.
Fluxá says the company took this approach to its store design when it first started expanding outside of Spain.
“We thought it was interesting not to repeat [the design of the Spanish stores],” he explains. “The world today is becoming a little bit boring, everything is becoming the same. So we thought it was interesting for the brand, and for the cities, to do different designs from one place to the other.”
Camper is a family-owned company; Fluxá’s great-grandfather, a Mallorca farmer, founded the business in 1877 and his father went on to establish the brand as we know it today in the 1970s.
Fluxá says that this allows the company to experiment with different design approaches for its stores without worrying about the commercial impact.
Staff at the original Camper factory founded in 1877
“We’re lucky to be a privately-owned company, a family-owned company, so we look at the long term and we try to do things that we like to do,” he says.
“Of course, we think it’s of benefit to the brand. It’s given a lot of identity to the brand, and customers recognise it. Some concepts work better than others but the reality is that we don’t measure it.”
An old brick and timber house appears to have been cut in two inside the new Shanghai flagship store for shoe brand Camper, designed by Chinese architects Neri&Hu (+ slideshow)
Photograph is by Shen Zhonghai
Intended to evoke the look and feel of one of Shanghai’s traditional narrow streets, the newly constructed building was inserted within an old industrial warehouse to turn the store into a “house within a house”.
Photograph is by Shen Zhonghai
“The Camper Showroom/Office in Shanghai recalls both the spatial qualities and the vibrant activities characteristic of life in a typical Shanghai alleyway, called a nong-tang,” explained architects Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu.
Photograph is by Shen Zhonghai
Constructed from reclaimed wooden frames and grey bricks, the house structure extends out from one wall of the interior. A mirror runs along one edge, creating the impression of a hinge, while the sliced edges are finished in bright red paint to match the block letters of Camper’s logo.
Photograph is by Shen Zhonghai
Offices are located within the house’s upper floors, while the lower level accommodates a traditional shop where shoes are presented on perforated bronze shelves that were custom made by the designers.
Photograph is by Shen Zhonghai
More shoes are attached to steel hooks and hang down from a series of suspended steel rods outside the house – a reference to clothes hanging out to dry.
Photograph is by Shen Zhonghai
The space below offers a gathering area, which can be used for hosting talks and presentations, and is naturally lit via a huge skylight.
Photography is by Dirk Weiblen, apart from where otherwise indicated.
Here’s more information from Neri&Hu:
Camper Showroom/Office Shanghai, China
Drawing inspiration from the surrounding urban condition, the Camper Showroom/Office in Shanghai recalls both the spatial qualities and the vibrant activities characteristic of life in a typical Shanghai alleyway, called a “nong-tang”.
The exterior lane extends into the showroom creating a physical sectional cut of the new house and a gathering space used for presentations and talks. A mirrored surface at the end of the lane visually lengthens the sectional cut.
Neri&Hu inserted their interpretation of a brick and reclaimed wood clad two-storey house into the shell of an existing warehouse, resulting in a layering of spaces from exterior to interior to the in-between, which showcases a unique hanging shoe display.
The house is constructed out of timber framing using locally sourced reused wood and grey bricks as infill material. The wood salvaged from demolished lane houses reveal years of patina from paint, newspaper and wallpaper still attached to the planks.
A new skylight addition above heightens the experience of being in an exterior alley by casting long linear shadows across the walls throughout the day.
Several furniture pieces were custom designed for the project; the bronze perforated shelving, the Neri&Hu Solo Chair with special edition red legs, and a ‘Lazy Susan’ table for the Press Room.
In this movie Dezeen filmed at the opening of the new Camper store in New York, Japanese designer and Nendo founder Oki Sato explains why he covered the interior walls of the store with over a thousand white plastic shoes.
Oki Sato of Nendo
“I’ve been working with Camper for the past few years on their small retail stores,” says Sato.
“The concept [for the small stores] was these shoes walking in mid air, showing that Camper shoes are not for running fast or for luxury or things like that, but something to enjoy walking.”
However, Sato goes on to explain that designing the interior for the larger New York store located on Fifth Avenue, one of world’s biggest shopping streets, was much more challenging.
“Camper asked me a few months ago to find a solution for the big stores that have really high ceilings,” he says. “Because the product is obviously very small, we weren’t sure how to use the ceiling height. Before they used a lot of graphics on the ceiling but it looked really empty.”
Nendo‘s solution was to completely cover the walls in the store with white plastic replicas of Camper Pelotas, the brand’s signature shoe design. The current collections are then displayed amongst these replicas in spaces at the base of the walls where customers are able to reach.
“What it’s doing is making the products really stand out – the colours, the forms of the products,” says Sato. “It starts from a single product but by copying and pasting it becomes an interior element. It catches a lot of light and shadow and gives a lot of texture to the space.”
The protruding shoes also provide an important acoustic benefit, Sato says: “It absorbs the sound so it feels much more comfortable as well.”
Sato goes on to explain that he believes physical retail environments are still important, despite the rise of shopping online.
“Just one click on the internet and you can buy any of these shoes from wherever you are,” he says. “But I guess it’s really the experience of the space that is the most important thing. It’s a space that you have to be there, you have to feel something.”
“In the end if a guy comes into the store and he doesn’t want to buy any shoes in the beginning but he gets excited and he buys a shoe I think that’s the victory of design. That is the goal for interior design in a way.”
Interview:we caught up with Miguel Fluxá, head of shoe brand Camper, at the opening of the brand’s Nendo-designed boutique on Fifth Avenue in New York last month (below). In this short interview, he explains why the company uses different designers for each of its global stores for cultural, rather than business, reasons (+ slideshow).
Designers as diverse as Jaime Hayón and Shigeru Ban have designed stores for Camper. “The world today is becoming a little bit boring, everything is becoming the same,” says Fluxá. “So we thought it was interesting for the brand, and for the cities, to do different designs from one place to the other.”
As a family-owned company, Camper is able to experiment with different design approaches without worrying too much about the commercial impact, he says: “Some concepts work better than others but we don’t measure it really.”
Miguel Fluxá: My name is Miguel Fluxá. I work at Camper and I’m a member of the fourth generation of the company. My great grandfather founded the business 136 years ago and I’m from Mallorca, where Camper is from and where my family comes from. This week we’re in New York, at the store opening on Fifth Avenue that we just did with Nendo.
Marcus Fairs: How did Camper start?
Miguel Fluxá: The story started in 1877 when my great grandfather founded the first shoe factory in Spain, 136 years ago. He had the idea to make good-quality shoes. He was a farmer and he probably didn’t speak any English and he probably didn’t have any money, but he went abroad, to France and England, and he came back after a couple of years with the machinery to set up a shoe factory.
Then after many years, in 1975 my father joined the family business and created Camper as a brand and he incorporated this heritage of knowing how to make quality shoes with design and comfort. He tried to make well-designed shoes that you can wear every day. This is the basis of the product today.
To that we added some cultural values. We come from Mallorca, from the Mediterranean, there’s a slow way of life there. Camper means farmer in Mallorquin, which is the language we speak in Mallorca, and when you mix all these ingredients together, you get Camper. I think the success has probably been trying to make something different, something original with quality.
Marcus Fairs: Camper uses different designers to create different store interiors around the world. Why did you start doing this?
Miguel Fluxá: When we started to open stores outside Spain we thought it was interesting not to repeat them. The world today is becoming a little bit boring, everything is becoming the same. So we thought it was interesting for the brand, and for the cities, to do different designs from one place to the other. We started to do this many years ago and it’s something that has given us a lot of identity and has worked quite well over the years.
Marcus Fairs: Do you do this for cultural or commercial reasons?
Miguel Fluxá: It’s more a cultural thing. We’re lucky to be a privately-owned company, a family-owned company, so we look at the long term and we try to do things that we like to do. Of course we think it’s of benefit to the brand. It’s given a lot of identity to the brand, and customers recognise it.
Marcus Fairs: Do you measure the commercial impact of the interiors?
Miguel Fluxá: Some concepts work better than others but we don’t measure it really.
Marcus Fairs: Footwear, especially sports footwear, is getting really technological with high-tech materials and embedded technology. Is this a path Camper may follow?
Miguel Fluxá: We are interested. For sure we are interested. The DNA of the brand is more in natural leathers, European leathers, and this is our heritage. We are shoemakers, we’re not a sports brand. But it’s true there are more and more techniques, more and more materials. For example in the outsoles there is a lot of development in the lightness of the materials, and also in the uppers.
Miguel Fluxá: Personally I love New York. I spent six months here when I was young. For me it’s probably the capital of the world. A lot of things happen here. A lot of good culture, architecture, museums, food, everything. It’s good to come here from time to time especially if you come from an island, which is completely the opposite.
Marcus Fairs: Do Americans appreciate design in the same way Europeans do?
Miguel Fluxá: In America they do have a good tradition of architecture and design. It’s true that it was probably more in the forties, fifties and sixties than today. But I think there are people who appreciate design, European design. Our design is more European, more refined and more casual, but there are a lot of people here who appreciate it.
Mori in giapponese significa Bosco. Dal momento in cui Dai Fujiwara ha disegnato questa collezione per il brand spagonolo ha ricercato un tessuto che unisse il desiderio tattile del materiale con la collezione medesima. La lavorazione è a maglia, inusuale per questo tipo di accessori, tiene insieme un tessuto composto da carta per il 64% della sua composizione, lasciando il resto al poliestere. La collezione è composta da una borsa di due misure, zainetto, tote bag e portafoglio.
Le studio japonais de design Nendo a conçu l’intérieur du nouveau magasin de chaussures de la marque espagnole « Camper » à New York. Les équipes ont couvert les murs avec plus de 1000 chaussures blanches. Une création étonnante à découvrir en images dans la suite l’article.
Over a thousand ghostly white shoes protrude from the walls of this New York store for shoe brand Camper, designed by Japanese studio Nendo (+ slideshow).
Nendo arranged the shoes in a regimented pattern across every wall, intended to look like they are “walking on air”. Each identical shoe is a replica of the Camper Pelota, the brand’s most iconic footwear collection, and is made from white resin.
“When designing such a big space you have to face the challenge of how to use the upper half of the walls to display the shoes in areas with such high ceilings,” says Nendo. “Our new approach involves making models of the Pelotas shoes and decorating the walls with them to fill the space and create the feel of an orderly stockroom.”
There are a handful of openings at the base of the walls for displaying the current collections, which can easily be spotted due to their stand-out colours.
More shoes are displayed on white platforms in the centre of the store, while recessed openings house the brand’s sock and bag collections.
Camper ci chiede cosa faremmo se avessimo a disposizione un intero giorno di libertà. Io vorrei fare così tante cose che alla fine dormirei sdraiato fronte oceano tutto il giorno! A parte gli scherzi, se credi di avere l’idea giusta, puoi raccontarlo con una foto usando questa app di facebook oppure tramite la tag su twitter #dowhatyoulove. Ogni settimana fino al 15 aprile, Camper selezionerà un vincitore per un buono che ti darà la possibilità di scegliere un modello a piacimento della S/S 2013. Tutte le foto le potrete poi rivedere su camper.com/dowhatyoulove. Ultima cosa: se registrerete l’acquisto di un paio di scarpe Camper, ne potrete vincere un’altro a scelta da ritirare in uno degli store di Barcellona o Berlino, viaggio e spese pagate.
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