Moda in future of footwear design collab with De Montfort University

By

Nigel TAYLOR

Published
Dec 19, 2022

Fashion trade show Moda — which is part of the wider Spring Fair in Birmingham — is shining a spotlight on footwear for its next event from 5-8 February via a collaboration with De Montfort University.

It launched a design competition for final year BA (Hons) Footwear Design students and all 16 of the students have been invited to display their designs at the show. From the nine finalists, the winner will be announced at an awards ceremony on Sunday 5 February. 

Visitors to the show will also be able to vote for their favourite design and the one with the most votes will receive the Buyer’s Choice Award.

Alejandra Campos, Event Director, Moda said that the “standards were very high and the innovation and creativity from the students is inspiring”.

The nine finalists are: Baldeep Nangla (Bobby), Woosung Kim, Gyoungryoung Kwak (Lynn), Cameron Murdoch, Jong Won Kim, Madison Harwood-Scott, Jemma Swales, Jihwi Ahn, and Alfie Payne. 

Their project brief was based on the Quagga horse-zebra hybrid native to South Africa that was hunted to extinction in the 1880s. Interestingly, it's considered to be a worthy candidate to reverse engineer its genetic make-up and therefore a ‘Quagga project’ is in progress to create the breed again, and hopefully reintroduce it back into the wild. 

Because the Quagga evolved through specific conditions, students were tasked to create footwear that also evolves through certain conditions and the framework was designed "to disrupt the classic creative process”. 

De Montfort’s Nanette Westberg-Brown said: “The Quagga project is a unique concept that allows students to really push their design boundaries and explore niche footwear theories and innovations. The results are equally as unique as the brief.”