Introducing Jimmy Choo / Marine Serre

BEHIND THE COLLABORATION: IN CONVERSATION WITH SANDRA CHOI AND MARINE SERRE

Connected with that is the idea of sports. It's something that has inspired your clothes a great deal, Marine - you cycle every day, and you played tennis for years. What are the sports references you look at? How does sports influence your designs?

Marine Serre: When you are used to something as a child, even if you don't do it as much as before, it stays part of you. I started sports at four years old: it’s now part of how I move somehow, part of how my body is constructed.

Sandra, sport is something that you are constantly thinking about with Jimmy Choo: even with high heels, you have referenced the idea of a ‘trainer attitude’. What is the influence of sport in your design process?

Sandra Choi:You can't ignore sports - every other person is in some kind of sports gear. And I'll say personally, I'm much more lifestyle sports driven than the actual performance sports. I mean, my first love was really a Converse trainer, which is the most iconic, simple trainer, because it's just a very simple basketball shoe.

What kind of sports influences can we see in this collection? How does it manifest?

MS: It’s obviously emphasised with the Kung-Fu shoes, the MOON BOXING KATO SNEAKER - dressing a Kung-Fu team in the film I produced with Sacha Barbin and Ryan Doubiago to showcase the collection. That shoe was really designed for the wearers, because they are Kung-Fu masters. It was important to give a functionality to the shoe, to make sure that it was going with a full look but that it would work. The most important moment for me there was when the Kung-Fu artists tried the look, and I asked them, “Okay, do you feel good? Do you feel right? And do you feel like you are really going to be able to perform?”

SC: So, your question to the wearers, when you were kind of setting everybody’s look was, are you comfortable? Can you feel your shoes? And I hope the answer was no, that they were very happy with their shoes - they couldn’t feel them, they became part of them.

Marine, you’ve spoken about your own jimmy choo shoes - which are from 2000. Did you draw inspiration from specific styles from the jimmy choo archives for this collection?

MS: We couldn’t go to the archive because of COVID-19. But we worked with images and we evolved styles: we added jersey, we used new cuts and vintage cuts. The MOON LOZANGE SOCK ANKLE BOOT, came from a vintage style.