Misawa, a shoemaker who always strives for perfection in his work, is drawn to imperfections, irregularities, and traces of time when he is away from shoemaking. “Ruins" was inspired by a visit to Warsaw in 2016, where he saw a number of building walls with plaster peeling away to reveal the bricks inside. Misawa wanted to express, in his own way with shoes, the beauty he found in the ruins of time that was burned into his mind.
Misawa used three pairs of shoes made by legendary shoemaker Nikolaus Tuczek, who is the object of admiration among shoe collectors, because of their beauty, exquisite workmanship, and rarity. The three pairs of shoes were disassembled and reconstructed by combining their parts to give form to the image that attracted him in Warsaw. To give them a desolate look, he damaged them by burning them with a burner or shaving them with a grinder, and opened the toes to expose the threads inside.
Misawa says that taking vintage shoes made by his predecessors in England about 100 years ago, that were no longer wearable, and breathing new life into them with his own skills was genuinely exciting. He was reviving a shoe that had once died.
What has he done with Tuczek's shoes? Some shoe enthusiasts may scoff at this idea of Misawa. But is not the absolute value system of a few shoe enthusiasts often a narrow and boring way to appreciate the beauty of footwear? Creating something new while respecting tradition is something that craftsmen and artists have done before, and it is something they are proud of. “Ruins" represents Misawa's antithesis to those who try to cram the beauty of shoes into a constrictive mold.
