JULIAN HAKES

“One late summer night I was in the studio, thinking about the design of shoes in general. I wondered why there was the need for 
a foot plate in high heels.When I look at a foot print in the sand it was clear to me that the main force goes to the heel and ball, even more so in a heeled shoe.

If you were to stand with your heel on a wooden block the foot naturally spans the gap to the floor. If the foot has its own inbuilt strength and support why duplicate this?
You would not have a shirt with rigid arms between the elbows and the wrists.

So this raised the question: if the early design of a shoe was an evolution of the humble sandal was this process limited by the materials and technology available? How can new materials and design techniques lead to a new solution, an evolution, possibly a revolution?

So I began exploring these questions in a similar way to how I would design a building or a bridge; examining the load path and looking at the most simple, elegant yet poetic expression of the forces at play within the materials used.

The resulting form was rather like a twist of lime peel and so I named it the ‘Mojito’.
The Mojito is a unique shoe design. It is a single wrapped geometry which starts under the ball of the foot, sweeps over the bridge, then down below the heel before twisting back on itself to provide the support for the heel”.
Julian Hakes