Marloes ten Bhömer designs shoes that are unlike anything you have ever seen before. They are often described as "provocative and otherworldly" They have more in common with architecture or the Japanese art of origami than high street fashion.
![]() |
grey glassfibre shoe |
By taking art and fusing it with the cutting edge technology of CAM; Computer Aided Manufacturing, ten Bhömer challenges our pre-conceptions and allow us to re-discover shoes in new and interesting light.
![]() |
Moulded leather shoe |
The design language of these shoes is clean lines with the emphasis on materials, and construction techniques that are closer to architecture than women’s fashion. As the shoes do not conform to existing social codes and cliched styles they allow a rare freedom to explore design for art's sake and allow women to step outside the boundaries set in fashion design. The shoes then start to enter the realm of wearable sculpture or architectural forms.
‘In her efforts to change an object whose form has shifted only slightly over centuries and her wide-ranging investigations into unconventional materials, shapes and construction methods, Marloes ten Bhömer is a Hussein Chalayan for the extremities.’ (Wallpaper Magazine, 2005, edition 37)
![]() |
rapidprototype shoe |
The Rapidprototypedshoe, is an experiment in high-tech shoe making. The technology transforms a digital model of a person's foot into a physical shoe, with the click of a print button. Rapidprototypedshoe is built using an additive manufacturing technology, a three-dimensional printer using a laser to bind to together successive layers of a photopolymer material is UV cured. Rapidprototypedshoe is built in one go, but is designed in such a way, that it can be dismantled for the purpose of replacing parts.
Beigefoldedshoe is origami like pair of shoes made of a single piece of leather folded round a stainless steel support .
‘Ten Bhömer’s experimentation with new shoes typology began when she was a child and slavered an old pair of her mother shoes in a paper-mâché to exaggerate their shape.
Twenty years later, when looking for a way to create a shoe of varying thicknesses, the Dutch designer remembered her mothers’ heels and began to experiment…’ (Wallpaper Magazine, 2005, edition 37).
Marloes ten Bhömer a London based Dutch product designer who graduated from the London College of Fashion & The Royal College of Art. She is considered one of the most promising designers of her generation and has exhibited worldwide.
More of her amazing shoes can be seen here on her website marloestenbhomer.squarespace.com
Now just to find where to buy these shoes .....