From the Studio • Gardens as Design
Meet the Pink Floral Capsule, Why One Shoe Holds Seven Years of Craft
This shoe holds seven years of craft not because it took seven years to make, but because it's the synthesis of everything I've learned about design by watching gardens. And that story starts with my mother.
My relationship with gardens started before I understood I had one. Growing up, I spent hours in my mother's garden. She spent any free moment she could there and she taught me and my sisters not just how to plant things, but to appreciate what made them beautiful. It was never just, "Look at that gorgeous peony." It was always, "Look at the way those petals have a gradation in color. Look at the layered effect, the fullness of it." She looks at flowers the way an artist looks at a composition. The color. The texture. The form. But more than that, she understood something fundamental about what makes a garden beautiful: it is never one texture. A garden is something spiky next to something round, something matte next to something that catches the light. It's the contrast that makes it alive.
That's always stayed with me.
Every season, I design shoes inspired by what I see in a garden. Sometimes that inspiration translates into a hand-painted watercolor that I turn into a silk print or a shoe print. Sometimes it becomes dimensional leather flowers, carefully layered and shaped. Sometimes it's embroidery. The medium changes, but the source is always the same. It's rooted in that lesson my mother taught me about composition, about mixing different elements, about texture and layering and the beauty of contrast.
The designs have evolved. The hand-painted prints gave way to dimensional leather flowers. Then we started exploring embroidery, adding thread and beads and materials that create depth and movement.
Each technique was a way to capture something different about what makes a garden beautiful. This season, I brought all of those techniques together.
I've been working with the same artisan for seven years now. She's the person who brings the most ambitious visions to life. She's created the embroidered details on our art-inspired limited editions, and with each collection, she's pushed what's possible with needle and thread and material.
A few months ago, I came to her with a sketch and one instruction: mix everything she knows, every technique, every material.
I did this on a special version of our Perfect Crossover Sandal, in both the 50mm version and the platform 80mm. It's the foundation that lets the embroidery be what it is without competing with it.
She used twenty-three different materials. Silk. Thread. Sequins. Raffia. Beads. Some of the flowers aren't just embroidered. They're dimensional, rising off the shoe itself, creating shadows and depth and movement. She spent fifty hours on the embroidery on each pair. Not because it needed to look a certain way, but because that's what it took to capture what a garden actually feels like.
What strikes me most about this shoe is that it's a distillation of how I think about design. A garden with only one kind of flower is not nearly as beautiful as a garden with different heights, different colors, different shapes, different textures, things that spike and things that round, things that shine and things that absorb light. The beauty is in the combination.
That's what I've been building toward, season after season. Every hand-painted print was learning how color works. Every dimensional flower was learning how to build height and shape. Every embroidered detail was learning what happens when you add movement and texture. This shoe holds all of it.
Now, as a mother myself, with Mother's Day just passed and my mom's important birthday recently behind us, I've been thinking about what actually matters and why it matters. What do I want to pass along to my children? I've realized that my love of gardening comes directly from the hours I spent in the garden with my mom. There's something about feeling the satisfaction of seeing something grow that you planted with your own two hands, and then stopping to notice all of the details.
Next month, my sisters and I are taking my mom on a garden tour through Sussex to see some of the most famous gardens in England. Sissinghurst. Great Dixter.
And then we're heading to the Chelsea Flower Show, a lifelong dream of mine to attend. Who knows what that will spark for the next collection!
Shop the Limited Edition Pink Floral Capsule
Sand Calf
Black Suede
Gold Textured Saffiano
Natural Fine Woven Linen
White Satin
Silver Textured Saffiano+ 1
