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Friday, 16 September 2011

Victoria Spruce - Graduate Showcase

Photography by Lucas Seidenfaden


Looking at Victoria Spruce’s sculptural footwear it’s hard to tell where the heel ends and the shoe begins; where the upper becomes the sole. Fluid lines in plastic and leather create continuity, a constant. It is as if the shoe were made of water, flowing into a dramatic curved heel.

The soft blues, creams, and lilacs of the collection add a dreaminess and complement the organic design. The hard shiny plastic and supple leather could have sent the footwear into a dark fetish realm, an issue Victoria was aware of.

"I’m always drawn to subtle colours, and I was conscious of the fact I was using hard plastic – I needed something to tone it down.” Victoria, a Royal College of Art graduate, told me how she was initially inspired by ceramic sculptures she stumbled across on the Internet. As if controlled by fate, she found the sculptures again in a college exhibition, and decided then to allow herself be inspired by them.

The fluid, continuous aesthetic came about in the initial stages of the design process.
“I started playing around with bits of paper on the foot, and I thought why does the heel have to be separated, why doesn’t the whole thing evolve as one?”

The subtle futurism of Victoria’s designs was achieved using 3D printing and graphic prototyping, and she felt it was important to combine her knowledge of traditional footwear design with these modern techniques.

The ethereal collection has garnered Victoria attention with all the right people, and has encouraged her to push it further, to put herself under the spotlight she deserves. “The amount of interest it’s generating at the moment, I’ve got to go with it. I really want to develop these for production.”


Text: Natasha Slee