Hi, I’m Chekii Harling, and welcome to After Party – the show where I interview sustainable brand founders in their natural habitats. In this episode I’m joined by the footwear designer, artist and upcycled trainer queen Helen Kirkum. Helen grew up in the South West of England, leaving to study for her BA in footwear at Northampton University, a course she discovered when visiting graduate fashion week. Having grasped the art of making shoes using traditional techniques, Helen enrolled on the MA Footwear course at the RCA, and worked at adidas for a year in Germany post graduating. A couturier of the feet, since 2016 Helen has been building her business centered around the 3 pillars of planet, process and play, cherishing imperfections and creating modern artifacts that are loved by sneaker heads and art collectors alike. Have you ever wondered what happens to your old shoes when you recycle them at a clothing bank? The lucky ones might make it to Helen’s studio, collaged into new footwear fabrics, a feat of design made possible by her studio’s relationship with the clothing charity traid. When it comes to Helen Kirkum’s approach to waste no sole is left unturned, and she has more recently been making new materials out of sneaker tongues and shoelaces. In 2021, she became a recipient of the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN scheme, which supports new fashion talent through funding and bespoke mentoring. Her September 2022 presentation at London Fashion Week was poetically titled ‘Palimpest,’ meaning ‘something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.’ Her work reminds us that second-hand materials are embedded with memories, mystery and unknown paths travelled. As her brand puts it: this is ‘History in Remaking.’ In 2024, the brand created pieces for adidas, was shortlisted for a British Fashion Award as Accessories Designer of the Year and was Birkenstock’s first artist in residence at their Shoreditch-based creative studio. When she isn’t saving odd shoes from landfill, Helen can be found running community workshops, making upcycled homes for the plants in her studio and being an all-round good egg. Welcome to the After Party, Helen Kirkum! You grew up in the South West of England. How do you think your upbringing has informed the way you create today? I wasn’t in a super creative town, so I think I had to find ways to express my creativity. I’ve always been a studious person, and always enjoyed doing well, I was head girl at school. I’ve always had this leadership geek thing, I like understanding how things are made. My dad was a design engineer and my mum made clothes when me and my sister were growing up, which we always had to model, she would sell them at craft fairs. I think I’ve always had this balance in the house between technical design and thrifty, crafty energy…there was always a sewing machine in the house. What did you make as a kid? We used to make perfumes out of rose petals and sell them to our neighbours for 20p. I was very arty, I liked to paint a lot. For my GCSEs me and a couple of my friends petitioned for the tutors to let us do an extra GCSE, so our teacher Mr Taylor, who I absolutely loved, taught an after-school resistant materials GCSE. That was the vibe of my childhood. I was doing CAD, and I made a 3D-printed whistle, and then in textiles I was making wall hangings. I always tried to push my creativity through as many different avenues as I could. You studied your BA at Northampton, a course that you discovered at Graduate Fashion Week? I did. And I’ve just become a Graduate Fashion Week ambassador, so it’s a nice full-circle moment. I stumbled across Northampton, which had a footwear course, I hadn’t even considered that shoes were something you could make. I just remember seeing these bronze brogues; they were so pointy and shiny, and encompassed everything that I’m interested in. It’s resistant materials, physics, maths, textiles, product design, and it’s art. So many things merged in a perfectly formed little object. How was Northampton? The city is the home of British footwear design. You had all these factories that were steeped in tradition and craftsmanship – Church’s factory, Cheaney’s and Greensons. A lot of footwear unis are closing their courses, which is really sad, and we are definitely losing the craftsmanship of footwear. So I do find it important to advocate for it. In Northampton, it was all about longevity of products and creating things that last out of good quality materials. The sneaker industry is all about newness, it’s fast-paced – how quickly can we churn through these products? There’s such a disconnect between the two industries for me. I’m interested in taking that idea of longevity and craftsmanship and putting that into the sneaker design world. Let’s have a look at one of your early sneakers… This was my final BA at Northampton, and I had the opportunity to work with the Grenson factory, which was awesome because I love seeing how things are made on a big scale. In 2014 there wasn’t really a boom in the sneaker industry and Grenson had made this Vibram sole. The welted stitch around the side is the technique used to combine the sole and the upper. It’s a more handcrafted approach. At the time I was using materials like reflective mesh and neoprene which were new for the factory. They kind of hated those materials. I also worked with the tannery in Northampton to create textures on the leather, which were handpainted. Even then, I was always interested in manipulating materials instead of just accepting them as they are. This combination of traditional techniques, like the tannery, with the modern twist of acrylic paint was quite symbolic of my practice. I was drawn to imperfection, the left and the right shoes are not the same. “This project was called ‘How to accidentally, on purpose, make a mess,’ That really sums up my ethos in life.” – Helen Kirkum How was Northampton in general? I loved being in a campus uni and having all those factories nearby with support from the industry was invaluable. I applied for and won the Footwear Student of the Year Award with this collection, that was my first real taste of something bigger than just being a good student at Northampton. What did you hope to get out of your MA at the RCA? A few students from the year above me had gone to the RCA, and I really respected their work. So, seeing them go inspired me to apply. Winning the Footwear Student of the Year award gave me the funding to do the MA, which was perfect timing. When I was at RCA, I had learned how to make shoes really well, but I wanted to figure out how to unmake them. A technician once told me, “You don’t want to make trainers; that’s not a real shoe.” That stuck with me. What defines a “real” shoe? Everyone’s wearing sneakers now, so it was an interesting tension. Shoes have a real purpose; they’re not just an accessory like other items of clothing. I started playing around with sneakers, deconstructing them because I didn’t know how they were made. Typically, you make a shoe from a flat pattern, but I was interested in whether I could start building it in 3D. Why make it flat when it’s a 3D object? For me, it’s about layering colour, texture, and shape. What about your materials? The materials I collect inform everything. Unlike typical shoe-making, where you pick a color and find the matching material, I look at what I have available and build based on what I find. This is an organic way of working, using the materials in an authentic way. Alongside the sneaker leathers, I work with things like sneaker tongues and laces that I pick up in recycling centres to create new fabrics from these waste streams. Here’s a bag we made from shoelaces. I started creating organic, sculptural shapes and wanted to explore how I could scale these techniques using post-consumer waste. That’s where we developed our collage sneaker leather, which we can cut to make shoes. What other waste streams are you working with? The lace waste stream, the sneaker tongues, and then we had a lot of hardware components which are really cool like this Air Max one, all made from virgin plastic. We developed these charm kits where you can basically jazz up your shoe without adding extra waste. That’s a good segway into your sourcing process. You work with TRAID and their single shoe bundles. At the RCA, I hijacked a textiles trip to the TRAID warehouse which is in Wembley. I was expecting they might have a few old shoes that I could just take back, but then when I got there they had mountains of single shoes, because if you donate your shoes and you don’t tie the laces together that’s where they end up. They had a lot of singles, and I thought ‘this is a raw material that I could utilize.’ We clean them, deconstruct everything down to its component pieces and then build the material. Were you shocked at the amount of waste there was? It was quite stark that this is just one warehouse in North London, and there are so many all over the UK, it was the realisation that we’re throwing a lot of stuff away. What advice would you give to people listening to this that want to recycle their shoes as ethically as possible? If you donate them to a charity shop, or a charity bin, definitely secure them together as a pair, but also only donate them if they’re actually good quality. The best thing you can do is repair and look after your shoes for as long as you can. A lot of local cobblers do sneaker repairs as well because they’ve realised it’s a big market. A lot of people don’t see the point in repairing things… It’s not our fault; it’s how society has made us care about fashion. It’s very fast-paced, it’s cheap, repairs can be expensive, and I think that buying good-quality products can also be expensive. We have been
