New Life From Sneaker Death (EXCLUSIVE)
All good sneakers go to heaven. But not all of them must die. Kosuke Sugimoto's "Shoetree" project envisions a sort of sneaker afterlife by rebirthing sporty shoes as beautiful flower conversations.
The notion of repurposing worn-out shoes is a simple enough premise that's existed at least since the pre-pandemic heyday of hypebeast homes. A Supreme brick here, a beat-up pair of Air Jordan 1s there — voila, instant bachelor pad. But Sugimoto's cleverly named Shoetrees are too sublime to be mere streetwear ornamentation.
That is, admittedly, sort of where Shoetrees came from. "First of all, I like sneakers," Sugimoto tells Highsnobiety while wearing atmos' recent adidas Predator Megaride. But the initiative also absorbs an existential consideration familiar to anyone who's ever loved a pair of vintage shoes.
"I find it fascinating that [a shoe can] become unwearable with the passage of time," says Sugimoto in reference to the process of hydrolysis, wherein sneaker soles crumble over time regardless of human wear. He calls this reconsideration a "justification of deterioration."
And so, to justify the deterioration of what were once symbols of athletic virility, Sugimoto transforms aged shoes — mostly Nike sport sneakers — into exquisite flower pots using "the optimal level of exaggeration so as to ensure that they do not become mere decorations."
The Shoetrees, which Sugimoto sells online for around $200 apiece, are thus semi-living artworks. Real but dead moss is carefully applied to the surface of each shoe, shielding the worn-out soles from further disintegration in a state of not-alive, not-dead stasis.
It's key that the moss is placed just-so to appear as though it's growing out from shoe's leather uppers, making the footwear look like forgotten artifacts from a long-lost race of hoopers. But it's equally important that Sugimoto finds footwear that fits his focus.
"Simple sneakers are not suitable," he says, calling them "monotonous." The weirder or more expressive the shoe, the better the resulting contrast.
Each completed sneaker, what Sugimoto calls a "Kickvase," demands about a half-day of work to complete. It's then paired with flowers that best match the shoe's colorway, thus creating a finished Shoetree, with the sneaker's laces winding around the floral stems.
Self-taught artist Sugimoto previously worked as a florist and it's hard not to see his Shoetrees as a contemporary form of Ikebana, or Japanese flower arrangement. Therein, it's as crucial to purposefully select flowers as it is to choose their vessel, preferably something off-kilter.
This is why the Shoetrees work even when one doesn't necessarily need to recognize the specific shoes selected by Sugimoto, the Nike Vandals and Dunks and Courts.
The resulting works sell themselves as a gorgeous juxtaposition of the organic and the unnatural, the alive and the dead, the history of Japanese floral art and the culture of footwear design. Nike by nature.
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