Walk This Way

Walk This Way
Marloes ten Bh�mer believes her shoes can change the world, one step at a time.

In the space between design disciplines, strangely beautiful objects live. And 26 year old Marloes ten Bh�mer is making them.

Part fashion and part architecture, her startling shoes feature heels that cantilever and curtain-wall toes that obscure the foot's shape, defying their impossible profiles to actually function.

Ever since her undergrad years, studying product design at the Academy of Visual Arts and Design in the Dutch city of Arnhem, ten Bh�mer has been fascinated by shoes as utilitarian structures, and their small scale meant she could fabricate them in her tiny home studio.

At the Royal College of Art in London, she began developing sculpted, folded footwear and contributing technical drawings and prototypes to fashion mavericks such as Alexander McQueen and Boudicca.

Ten Bh�mer's concepts crystallized in a product-design class taught by architect Ron Arad, whose own products and buildings push the envelope of conceptual design.

"Why should things make themselves understood immediately?" she asks.

Her lucky break came when Arad recommended his star pupil for a summer internship at the Italian design office of Tod's-echoes of her sketches even showed up in a spring/summer 2003 leather shoe made for sister company