Iris van Herpen's Autumn/Winter 2012 “Hybrid Holism” collection featured a new pair of shoes made in collaboration with United Nude. Dubbed the “Thorn”, the new footwear - the sixth collaboration between United Nude and van Herpen - are made with liquid slow molded uppers and feature a 19cm heel and hidden platform.
Hand-cut sharp-spiked stones including labradorite, tiger's eye, leopard jasper and moss agate pierce the platform and heel and create an arch of thorns, the focal point of the footwear, available in glossy nude/black or in matte black.
Even though the name of the United Nude shoes for van Herpen refers to the vegetable world, the more you look at them, the more you can detect in them as sort of futuristic inspiration: the thorns look indeed a bit like laser beams while the circular motif carved inside the platform makes you think about spiralling or vortex-like shapes in the universe, such as black holes.
Interestingly enough, the collection also features a maroon robot-like suit that indirectly evokes the colours of the robots in Gary Nelson's 1979 film The Black Hole (Maximilian included), revolving around the vicissitudes of the Palomino research vessel crew stumbling upon the mysterious Cygnus spaceship on the edge of a large black hole.
The film includes quite inspiring special effects and colours (by the way, Bill Thomas was the costume designer for this film), plus plenty of round/circle shapes that go from the metal structures of the long-lost starship Cygnus to the Palomino with its engines firing, from the spiralling vortex of the black hole attracting and swallowing the Cygnus to the spherical robot known as V.i.n.c.e.n.t.
In a way you can't help feeling that, if there ever was a remake of this film, the "Thorn" shoes would be the perfect footwear for some of the characters. Yes, they may not be that practical especially if you have to run away from an army of robots or a mad scientist, but that integrated toothed space between the platform and the heel would be a good metaphor for the black hole seen as a voracious beast that swallows up everything surrounding it.
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