Interview: Sophia Guggenberger

Who are you, what do you do and what drives you?

I talk, scheme and make things to understand how the world works. Mostly at the end there is a shoe, somehow, it never lets me go. Making things is an easy excuse to talk to other people.

What do you love most about your work? And what not so much?

Stepping into the fridge of a tannery where they keep the raw hides, to the big tumblers where the skins turn into leather. The huge kneading machines transforming a crazy synthetic mixture of chewing gum into sheets of rubber for outsoles. The industrial kitchen creating latex outsoles somewhere in the middle of nowhere in France. A small workshop in the centre of Cairo making shoes. The guy in Istanbul who offered me so many cigarettes I felt dizzy when I stumbled out of his subterranean outsole workshop. The cobbler in Berlin that let me work with him in his workshop. The many hours I spent with a friend watching a laser beam cut leather. Joking with the footwear technicians in the office when work was low (or high).

I am fascinated by transformation and the knowledge, skill and expertise that come along with that process. Knowing how things are made is the ultimate superpower and getting to know the people who do it is the ultimate game changer.

What´s the most important thing you are looking for in fashion? 

Honesty, as in: this is what we are doing and that is how we are doing it and in that we believe. I am not interested in how on trend or edgy or sustainable fashion is, I am looking for real words describing real things.

A reading, listening or streaming tip you give to your friends?

The Century of Self by Adam Curtis. Old but still as relevant as could be!

Which story do the clothes you design or wear tell?

All clothes that I wear are canvases of where i got stuck on the corner of something, which salad I ate, where my trembling morning hand spilt coffee or when I was too lazy to change into old clothes and was convinced I wouldn’t spill paint. 

I hope the shoes I design offer the same amount of storytelling potential to their future wearers.

What do you wish you had known earlier?

That the fist does not fit onto the eye at all.