Hi-Top Fancy

New Zealand-designed, hand-made sneakers are ToBe the next big thing.

Sneaker fanatics, here’s one for you. Though, actually, anyone who needs to slip something on their feet may soon be coveting this object of desire. The ToBe sneaker, designed in Wellington and crafted from Whanganui leather, launches in New Zealand mid-April. The ToBe abandons colour, overt branding or other gimmicky devices to focus on form, comfort and materials. The hand-made shoe is designed for anyone to wear, male and female, although the first production run is focused on male sizes.

There are few shoe designers in New Zealand, and some may say ToBe’s designer, Lee Gibson, isn’t necesssarily a shoe designer either. Gibson’s background is architecture, so how does he change scale from buildings to shoes? “There are many connections between footwear and architecture, and there are also many architects working within the footwear industry. One of the main designers of the Air Jordan range of sneakers from Nike was an architect before he moved to sneakers,” Gibson explains.

“Without having experience designing footwear I needed to draw on what I knew. I started looking at design principles and strategies that seemed to share common ground with graphics, architecture and industrial design, and realised that I could use these proportioning systems to design the footwear. This is where the shoe style names, (0.6, 1.0 and 1.6), came from – with the three shoes having a designed relationship, rather than simply having the same brand on the surface,” Gibson says. u