Paintings and prints usually come to our mind when we think about art inspiring fashion. But paintings – and in particular representations of classical scenes – can be wonderful inspirations not only for garments also for footwear.
Very basic sandals can be admired for example in the "Aldobrandini Wedding", a fresco thought to represent the preliminary stages of a nuptial ceremony.
If you visit Raphael's Rooms in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican you will instead see wonderful examples of more intricate flat sandals like these ones from "The School of Athens" painting. Quite often, though, the simplest designs are the best.
In the last few years we have seen a lot of creatives and young graduates from all over the world developing innovative ideas combining design, technology and fashion and, even in this case, the best products, those designs with the potential of radically changing and improving people's lives, are the simplest ones – a good example is the "Unifold" shoe.
Developed during a shoe-design class led by visiting assistant professor Kevin Crowley at New York's Pratt Institute by Horatio Yuxin Han, this shoe consists in a printable design produced in a one-piece pattern and in one biodegradable material that, cut along specific lines, can be folded into a usable and easily recyclable shoe.
Han called the project Unifold and created two models, a sandal and a closed-toe flat shoe using ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA). After graduating, Han put his online portfolio on Behance getting the attention of quite a few companies.
The flat and printable shoes can indeed be built without a last and therefore offer different applications and possibilities: a young designer with a very limited budget could start producing this footwear without spending millions on highly skilled labour forces, machinery or polluting products such as dyes. Footwear could also be produced at local level, allowing at the same time to reduce materials, packaging, shipping and manufacturing.
Last but not least, this system could provide footwear at a reasonable price to the hundreds of millions of people who can't afford shoes, especially children, even though Han himself created this project focusing more on the design rather than on the humanitarian aspects.
Han developed further footwear concepts, including "Charge", an advanced lightweight yet strong training shoe, and the "Origami Knight" boot concept that utilizes the traditional origami technique to allow the hard surface to flex, but he has also been working on digital art projects for games and interior design objects.
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