An Italian Shoemaker & an Afro-Atlantic Architect Created the Ultimate Slipper (EXCLUSIVE)
Giles Tettey Nartey has never designed a shoe, and yet the British-Ghanian architect was surprisingly in his element when creating the GTN Mule. Turns out developing spaces for a living gives you a good framework for designing sleek leather slip-on shoes.
“Both disciplines organize the relationship between a body and the ground,” Tettey Nartey tells Highsnobiety. “Shoemaking addresses many of the same issues as architecture but at an intimate scale, where the accumulation of small decisions really matters. A lot of the work comes down to detail: how materials meet, how joints are resolved, what gets emphasised or hidden, and what the finish does.”
These are all decisions Tettey Nartey has been poring over for years. In 2020, Alberto Deon, an old friend from Tetty Nartey’s university days at Politecnico di Milano, reopened his grandfather's shuttered shoemaking business as an avant-garde hiking brand named Demon Footwear. Deon immediately proposed creating shoes together and after many discussions, he and Tettey Nartey decided to officially get cracking last year.
The ensuing leather mule, releasing February 18 for €375 (around $443) at Dover Street Market Paris, speaks directly to Tettey Nartey’s practice.
Born in London, where he now resides, but raised in Accra, Ghana, Tettey Nartey creates projects and objects steeped in Afro-Atlantic themes. His 2024 design SERWAA was a traditional West African chair reimagined in aluminium while Blacked Ash incorporated a mancala game known in Ghana as “Oware” into a West African-style bench-bed. The GTN Mule is his take on a “chale wate,” the Ghanaian term for slippers.
“For me, it was an opportunity to test a synthesis: an Afro-Atlantic imaginary meeting a European making heritage,” says Tettey Nartey. “Historically, versions of the mule appear across many cultures, often without direct connection. In some way, my aim was to create a West African mule within that wider lineage.”
This is by no means a remake of the slippers and flip-flops Tattey Nartey says are “really ubiquitous” in Ghana. As with Demon’s signature beastly hiking boots, the mules are an eccentric form born out of traditional shoemaking practices. A thick-ridged Vibram sole spills out from the bottom of the all-black slip-on, meeting an upper where three types of locally sourced leather — in nubuck, smooth, and cracked treatments — create a complex patchwork of fluid panels.
“I’ve always been drawn to the ease and informality of mules. Their silhouette is low to the ground. You slip them on, you slip them off. I wanted that kind of readiness in the shoe, but I also wanted room to build an expression into it,” says Tattey Nartey. “The raised seams, prominent stitching, and the shifts in black tone and texture are all deliberate. The bumps and ridges shape the identity of the shoe, and they keep the construction visible.”
That construction is the work of Demon’s small factory in the Italian city of Montebelluna, while the campaign was shot in Accra, taking everything back to both parties’ origins. “It was important to me to build a world around [the mules] ... the storytelling sits in the images and films, and it also sits in the object itself,” says Tettey Nartey. “Shooting in Accra placed the shoe back into the context of its genesis.”
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