Enhancing the story of Mascolori
For each of these Dutch dress shoes, we ingrained a one-of-a-kind story that fashion-forward sophisticates could explain to their less-urbane friends. We drew on Amsterdam’s famous history with footwear and New York’s celebrated fashion scene to illustrate the creative partnership of Mascolori and Devona.
We recorded a common Dutch saying, Now my wooden shoe is breaking, and its American counterpart, Now that'll knock your socks off, and visualized the soundwaves in 3D models. We put the Dutch quote on the left shoe and the American quote on the right to add a bit of unexpected asymmetry to the pair.
The Dutch-American Friendship Treaty (1956) seemed the perfect metaphor for Dutch shoes designed by an American company. The pattern for this shoe visualizes the first lines from the treaty in binary code— created from the I and O in the Mascolori logo.
The pattern on this homage-to-the-klompen is drawn from real historical data. The coordinates from the logs of five Dutch trade ships sailing between Amsterdam and New York in the 1600s was fed into a custom program that rendered the routes as wood grain. Technically, this makes this collaboration (between us and the ship captains) over 400 years in the making.