A Martin Sallières Shoe Is “Very Prada,” but All His Own
Martin Sallières never planned to start a footwear brand. But then, as often happens, the French shoemaker found himself in the right place at the right time. Last February, a friend offered him space to show his own products in a Paris showroom in June. Sallières jumped at the chance.
The only issue: there wasn’t a single shoe to speak of. At least not yet.
Sallières had spent years at Dutch luxury label Filling Pieces and, later, as Sunnei’s Senior Footwear Designer. Now he’d settled into his freelance era, bringing his flavor of minimalist-but-slick, 90s-Prada-inspired silhouettes to the likes of Rains and skatewear brand Village PM, maker of the world’s hottest skate shoe. And as he started on the first models of his own design, ideas poured out.
“I drew the collection’s first style, the Racer, in a week and called a factory I'd been working with for years. Within three months, I had a collection,” he tells Highsnobiety. Even without holding a Heel Drop Racer or Bumper shoe in your hand, a quick glance at Sallières’ web shop will tell you why: each model feels almost artisanal, entirely unique to the vision Sallières sketched out. The clean, curving lines feel more inspired by the sports cars he grew up drawing than by the footwear he’s made for other brands.
Yet here, his shoes retain a looseness. “I sketched the sole and asked the factory to follow the lines I drew,” he explains, holding up a Racer’s gummy sole to the camera. “I could have made a perfect little diamond, but it's all by hand. They’re a bit wobbly.”
Though the shoemaker still operates on an incredibly small scale — a typical batch is maybe “70 or 80 pairs per color,” by his estimate — his perfectly imperfect vision for footwear has already hit. Dover Street Market London quickly came calling after the first Paris showroom, and Martin Sallières is now sold at stockists across Europe and Asia, the United States and Australia.
As Sallières plots out the next six months, sketching new models and working out the logistics of building a brand, we caught up with the shoemaker on a sprawling video chat from his Stockholm studio.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
The opportunity to start the brand dropped into your lap. Can you talk about those early days?
At first, I did it just to show [something]. That’s why I use my name for the brand: I did it so I'd have a portfolio to show what I can do, besides what I do for my clients. This is truly me. I went to Paris with low expectations, but then stores started buying. The whole wholesale machine started, and then I had to make it a real brand. All of a sudden, this playground for exploring my own aesthetic became a real brand. Now we’re three seasons in, and it's realer than ever.
The brand is sustaining itself in terms of cost and development, but I still like to freelance because I get to meet people and develop new products. It's feeding my own practice. And eventually, my goal is for the freelance projects to become more like collabs.
Starting your own label means you have full creative control for the first time. What did you do differently that wasn’t possible when working for other brands?
Well, I was a shoe designer starting a shoe brand, so I owed it to myself and other shoe designers to try something a bit innovative in terms of shapes. I developed this reversed drop sole, and then I just took time to sit with the product. When you work with fashion brands, you do so many different styles per season. I started with just two.
I also realized that I'm a shoe designer and not an art director or photographer or website builder. So I also got people who inspire me to help with this part of the business. That realization came a bit late; I was tackling one problem at a time. So many people work so long on the business plan, where it needs to be like this or distributed in that way. What works for me is to just take it as it comes.
The brand also feels uniquely yours.
From the beginning, it was important to me that the shoe is a highly engineered product. The mold for the Bumper is super technical. I can't believe I'm saying this, but every product should feel like a human was behind it. The shoes are not perfect. That also makes them human, because a computer doesn't make mistakes. That adds to the artisanal feel.
The color palette of your shoes is fantastic. How do you navigate that element?
Color is a very important part of my taste. I really think that you can fix any shoe with good colors. Even the ugliest shoe can be made interesting if you spend a bit more time on textures and colors.
And how long do you spend sketching? I know it’s a big part of your design process.
It goes fairly fast. I can have a final idea or a new concept in a day; I just make small variations as I communicate with the factory. What’s nice about a doodle is that my mind isn’t stuck on details; I'm locking in the idea of this shoe more than the actual product.
I spend a lot of time on the shoe's form; I don't add too many details or panels. When you look at a sneaker from the '90s, there are many little elements, like suede and mesh. That’s not my style because I don't have the patience for it.
There are a lot of sneaker-mules out there.
I see it online, but you don't see anyone wearing it. It's a weird product. [My shoe] is clearly a sneaker, but it's also very Prada in the late '90s and early 2000s. Prada was really a pioneer of this movement toward very clean footwear — you can wear it with a suit or with track pants.
Your whole design process revolves around shoes. When you're out in the world, are you watching what people are wearing and taking notes?
Constantly. I still look at what people wear, especially since I'm still freelancing and working with clients that sometimes want more commercial products. And it keeps me grounded — sometimes I look around and know none of these people will wear what I make. It's comforting that it isn’t a big deal if [the brand] fails. The reality is, you don't see Phoebe Philo flip-flops every day when you walk down the street. I wish, because it would be a lot more beautiful, but that's just not how it is.
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