I remember the first time I saw a Paracia shoe. Frederik Berner Kühl, who had collaborated with the brand through his namesake label, was showing me a pair of Paracia’s Non-Safety Shoe, a contemporary version of the footwear worn by builders and construction workers across the world. The shoe had a glossy leather upper, a protective rubber toe cap, and an athletic Vibram outsole. It was somehow a formal dress shoe and a functional utilitarian shoe in one. It was the type of shoe I’d seen a thousand times, but reinterpreted and contextualized in a completely mind-boggling way.
“We were renovating our store, and I started seeing that shoe around me,” says Knu Kim, one of Paracia’s co-founders. “And then I was with an architect friend, and I saw that they wore those shoes when they went on site visits. There are a lot of people working in construction in Madrid, so I often saw people wearing those particular shoes.” Surrounded by this functional silhouette, Kim decided to rework it. The resulting shoe, with a Derby upper and sporty outsole, also reminded the designer of his youth growing up in Busan — “a port city, quite rough,” he says. “There was no education of design, there was no art. But I grew up with shoes like that.”
Paracia was founded almost a decade ago as a collaboration between Kim and a childhood friend still based in Korea. For a while, the brand didn’t go anywhere. The two friends were both working full-time jobs and separated by thousands of miles. But a couple of years ago, Kim decided it was time to refocus on Paracia by designing a new collection and relaunching. “The idea is that we’re making versatile shoes that you can wear in different moments of your life,” Kim says.
The brand leans toward more formal styles, with Derbies alongside zip-up boots and hiking-inspired styles. Its motto is “enchant the mundane,” a phrase printed on the footbed of every pair of shoes they make. All of the brand’s silhouettes are based on well-known, everyday shoes with a slight twist — something that throws off the traditional look. It’s a kind of uncanny valley approach to functional and safe footwear.
From this current vantage point in footwear, the Paracia relaunch couldn’t have been timed better. After a decade of sneaker dominance, people have started to look toward a post-sneaker world. The immediate replacement was loafers, which quickly became ubiquitous amidst the prep revival. But the world is moving on again, and consumers are embracing freakier shoes, a process that arguably began with Tabis and now covers all manner of silhouettes. Paracia’s exaggerated proportions, square toes, and shoes designed for builders have made the brand perfect for this new era.
Among Paracia’s offerings, there’s also the Derby, complete with an oversized welt and exaggerated heel. The Cove boot is accentuated by a zigzag stitch running up its center, and the moc-toe Buster comes with a square toe. But the Non-Safety Shoe, which arose from the Berner Kühl partnership, is still the most emblematic of the brand’s grounded pragmatism. “Our collaboration grew out of a shared appreciation for industrial honesty,” Berner Kühl says. The Non-Safety “borrows the language of protective footwear but removes its formal obligation, allowing the silhouette to exist in a more everyday, human context.”
It’s also the closest Paracia has gotten to a sneaker, which itself is a category that Kim has mixed feelings about. “Sneakers are such a saturated market,” he says. “They’re shoes you buy and consume then throw them away; it’s always about having something new. I didn’t want to build a brand based on that. Our shoes can be repaired and resoled and worn forever.”
Other brands are also reflecting this move toward weirder, unconventional silhouettes. Danish label Mfpen has its Reunion Derby, a classic silhouette that is altered by a square toe, and Parisian footwear brand Adieu is known for playing with sizes and shapes. Like Paracia, both brands have taken traditional and well-known shoes and tweaked them. The changes aren’t so drastic that the shoes become unwearable, but they still set them apart from the security of a conventional Derby or boot. These new approaches often combine functional and formal styles, introducing workwear details like toe caps and chunky soles to traditional leather shoes.
For Paracia, creating interesting combinations is also a kind of business model. The brand has pushed the boundaries even further through its collaborations with emerging designers including Carter Young and JEONGLI. There’s also a collaboration with Canadian designer Colin Meredith in the works. “They’re all very different brands, but I like seeing how our shoes can fit with different styles,” Kim says. He points to the different touches brought by each partner, from Berner Kühl widening the Derby silhouette even further to the distressed fabrics used by Carter Young. Old silhouettes chopped and screwed with new details — and new collaborators. This might just be the Paracia way, which bodes exciting possibilities for the future of freakier, interesting shoes.
