Danish designer Alecsander Rothschild He went to his grandmother to create the sandal that appears on these lines. “I asked him who his favorite artist was. Told me that Constantin Brancusi, and I started working from there ”, he explains. Rothschild is one of four designers graduated from Central Saint Martins (London) who were finalists in the competition that Birkenstock organized together with the famous London school.
The process began in 2018 as an academic investigation aimed at finding new readings in the 250-year history that the German shoe house treasures. This led to an open call for design proposals that now leads to the Birkenstock x Central Saint Martins capsule. This March 1, the designs of the four finalist talents will be put on sale. And Rothschild’s is a synthesis of the life itinerary of this Dane who, before arriving in London, did an internship at Mugler and learned to develop his own style that he defines as “deconstructed glamor”. “I’m not attracted to Parisian chic, but to Divine, John Waters, the eighties,” he explains. “I am interested in fashion as performance. Excess, decadence, ways of interpreting glamor ”. Proof of this is his personal collections: underwear, accessories and deconstructed garments that refer both to the anti-fashion of the eighties and to the most glorious excesses of club culture.
In his collaboration with Birkenstock, however, the stridency diminishes to give way to a kind of extravagant minimalism that, again, refers to the reference provided by his grandmother. Thus, Brancusi’s work is translated into volume. “The silhouette of the upper piece of the sandal is, literally, the profile of one of his sculptures turned upside down,” he says. “I am also interested in the contrast of surfaces that exist in Brancusi’s work and that I have tried to reproduce alternating matte and very shiny surfaces.”
The Bukarest sandal, available in black, white and with silver details, is the result of a collaboration with the Birkenstock design and development team. “When you have so much time to develop there is a lot of time to test, it is something very different from creating a solo collection,” he explains. “It was very interesting to travel to Cologne [la sede de la firma] and meet the team, explore the initial idea and make changes from there. Birkenstock has a unique way of making things work. ” The result of this dialogue is the capsule collection that is part of platform 1774, that brings together the collaborations of this German firm famous for the comfort of its sandals. Bukarest, of course, are. And in them, the extravagance that characterizes Rotschild’s solo collections combines with their Scandinavian roots to generate a design “out of the binary, very sculptural, that you can look at from any point of view.”
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