Benoît Méléard

[cerfas]

Anyone with photos of his work...I would truly appreciate it if you posted them!

his work was never mass-produced

images from totemfashion.com

 

[cerfas]

 

[cerfas]

"I just adore that young Frenchman Benoît Méléard. His stuff is just so architecturally beautiful: it has a touch of weirdness." The quote is from Manolo Blahnik and is reproduced on Benoît Méléard's website. This is no coincidence. Méléard started his rebellion against the Paris fashion scene with a homage to both Blahnik's wispy foot-jewels and Beth Levine's conceptual sculptures.
But when Méléard launched his debut collection, Cruel, at the Natural History Museum in Paris in October 1998, no one had seen any innovative shoe design since - that's right - Beth Levine.
Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Shoe design had long been a craft that could boast of no rebels. Benoît Méléard changed that completely. After Cruel, Méléard rip-offs cropped up everywhere, like a game of Chinese Whispers: elliptic arches, pyramid shapes, boxy volumes, bare metal heels. The five collections, financed by Méléard himself, were never put into commercial production. Nor was that Méléard's intention. "AlI I wanted," he says in Bon (10/2002), "was to kick the fashion industry, and the shoe industry, in the ****... I wanted to say that shoe design potential is infinite, that we can change these volumes infinitely." Benoît Méléard has a studio at Porte de Clignancourt in Paris. He has collaborated with Alexander McQueen and Jeremy Scott and has exhibited at La Beauté in Avignon (2000), and elsewhere. - Salka Hallström-Bornold, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
The exhibition catalogue is available to buy from the Museum Shop.

http://www.nmpft.org.uk/fashination

 

[Scott]

oh yeah,i've always enjoyed his work. i remember when he was just starting to get attention back in '99....they did a feature on the rising footwear designers in Paris and he was there with his shoes made of human hair.

unfortunately,I dunno where to look for images at the moment. Will look round for some others.

 

[zamb]

cool posts, never heard of him before, but curious now.....................

 

[cerfas]

thanks scott
i really like the fact that he made such a definite statement (5 collections, not mass produced, nothing more)