Eric Hullegie

Collection: The Shoe Factory Revised

Design vision
How can you change and redirect an existing process in order to change the products that are its outcome? How can you use existing processes for purposes they haven’t been designed for?  That’s what matters to me. My focus is not on designing finished products or on mastering or applying known artisanal skills. Instead I concentrate on ways of production. For this reason I cooperated with the Spanish shoemaker Camper, not being a trained shoemaker myself.  It was my aim to have the people of Camper do what they are best at – making shoes according to longstanding technical standards and procedures - and at the same time add something of my own by interfering with the process of production. In this way I cleared the ground for new results in terms of construction, the use of different techniques, materials and forms.
Today’s circumstances in my opinion make it more necessary than ever to take a closer look at different possibilities with already existing means and resources, a topic returning in the second part of my graduation. Changing and speeding up the application of new and conventional production processes to new ends play a key role in this second collection.

Born: 1989 Nijmegen NL
Eric was an intern at Camper
Contact and information:eric@erichullegie.nl
www.erichullegie.nl


Research and Inspiration
I started working with leather and shoes in the second year of my studies. I like leather as a material. It’s soft and easy to mould. Yet, what interests me is not the shoe as a fashionable item. I focus on finding new ways of making them, and more in general I focus on innovating processes by which products are made. In Spain, while I was an intern at Camper on the island of Majorca, I started a series of experiments with lasts that are the basis of shoe production.  I cut them up, reassembling men’s lasts and women lasts.  Right now I’m combining a roll of lycra with sheets of plastic netting. The lycra has a gradual changing colour print. With the aid of a last I mould the lycra and gaze combination in a vacuum machine. It’s a simple and unconventional process for the production of shoe uppers, each shoe having a different look thanks to the different colour prints.