Germany's Weirdest Shoemaker Made Shoes Backwards on Purpose
There is no such thing as a normal Trippen shoe. The German company and Highsnobiety-accredited good-shoes-maker turns leather from small family-run tanneries into experimental oddities like its box-shaped Barge slip-on, grounded by a sole of two chunky plinths, and its Chill chukka boot where punched-out holes pepper the upper. In the words of Michael Oehler, who co-founded the company in 1991, this is “unconventional and timeless” footwear.
“We have always stayed true to our original values without compromise,” he continues, which means modular easy-to-repair constructions, in-house manufacturing at its rural German base, and exclusive use of ethically sourced fabrics. It also means perpetually getting freaky with it, which is exactly what Trippen has done with its newest shoes designed with burgeoning Berlin designer Karl Valentin Gebhardt.
The two first met when Gebhardt was a fashion student, experimenting with plonking the back of one shoe onto the front of another. First he Frankensteined together worn-out Nike dad shoes, then stitched the heel of a Brooks running shoe to the front of a brown leather dress shoe, and finally he turned two Soviet-era loafers into the footwear equivalent of a double-bladed lightsaber. Every time, the front end of the shoe unexpectedly curls upwards and forms a sharp snub-nosed toe.
What did the man behind Trippen, who famously specializes in funky stuff, think of Gebhardt’s footwear provocations? “What a beautiful idea,” Oehler says. “These are the kind of concepts that make you happy because they bring something truly new and unexpected.” And so, they got to work making a backwards-facing Trippen.
The Sisyphos, an existing Trippen derby whose canoe-like form is created by stitching its back onto its front, and the Icaros, a boot made in the same pointy-toed vein, are the first expressions of Gebhardt’s concept, available now with exclusive colorways on the young German designer’s website. And while their creation was admittedly pretty simple, given that they’re built atop existing shoes — Gebhardt compares his approach with Virgil Abloh’s 3% rule of just tweaking an existing shape — the result is bizarre, novel, and surprisingly deep.
“Everything in nature is cyclical, such as the hours, the years, even time,” says Gebhardt. “Our understanding of time is artificial because we understand it as linear: past, present, and future. You could also see it as cyclical, and the same goes with the economy. If we would get an awareness of the cyclicity of life and history, then we wouldn't fall into the same traps.” This ilk of armchair philosophy, backed by theories such as William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Four Turnings, informed Gebhardt’s back-to-front shoemaking, which literally turns every step forward into a step back.
Trippen, with its philosophy of repairing old shoes so they can theoretically last forever — Gebhardt was especially impressed when he saw 20-year-old models being resoled during his visit to Trippen’s German workshop — is an apt partner to create Gebhardt’s vision. Time might be an infinite repeating loop, but if you treat these shoes as Trippen intends, they can also go through their own infinite repeating loop of being worn down and repaired, worn down and repaired.
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