CITY Issue 51

CITY LIFE there, realizing her real interest lay in shoes. She enrolled in a course at Cordwainers, an old footwear college that has since merged with the London College of Fashion. Upon graduating with first-class honors, she found work designing shoes for companies such as Terraplana and Anti Apathy before joining the Té Casan team. Robinson, 35, now lives and works in Barcelona, where the company’s headquarters and design studios are based. Yet she is rarely there for long spells before gallivanting off to exotic locales: Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Thailand, India, and most of Europe. A dozen years ago, she even lived in the States for a few years. “I get my ideas from everywhere: from traveling, flea markets, to an old piece of fabric found at the market,” she says. “Lots of treasures are found at flea markets.” Indeed, she likes her thrift stores and f lea markets. So far on this trip, she’s come across a few noteworthy, off-the-beaten-track treasure troves in Georgia and Florida. Sandra’s Flea Market, in a small town called Palatka, Fla., near Gainesville, is one. There she found a collection of well-cared-for shoes that were still in their original boxes. Multicolored fabric pumps, sexy dorsays, and cute slingbacks with bows sported modest heels, and the occassional towering 2.5-incher. She’s noticed satin pumps (à la bridesmaids shoes), bows, frills, and pastels and florals in a repeated pattern. In Palatka, she also came across a mobile thrift store in a truck called Helping Hands. All the sale profits go toward helping local victims of domestic violence. That sense of com- munity and people looking after each other, Robinson says, is inspiring and perhaps what she loves most about small Southern towns. At Nana’s Fabrics in Waycross, Ga., the little shack of seven rooms was filled with wall-to-wall fabrics and trimmings like the toile de joie pattern Robinson learned is very popular in the South. The morning I talked to her she was about to head to her next port of call that day— Gee’s Bend, Ala., home to a long-standing tradition of quilt makers. “Lots of my work is about handcrafts and local skills,” she says. “I love the stories that are community based—the overall spirit is incorporated in the designs.” Robinson uses recycling considerably in her shoe design, creating shoe templates that she later reuses, simply putting swaths of different fabrics onto them. She’s inspired by the traditional patchwork quilting of thrift store shirts and has used vintage recycled headscarves on shoes as seen in her previous collections. Her shoes are in theory all one-ofa-kind and each style comes in a limited-edition run. Once she finishes up this inspiration tour, the hard part begins. Robinson will sit down with all her finds from the trip and figure out how to integrate the materials and patterns to create the 25 different styles that will comprise her new fall collection. “Shoes take you on journeys,” she says before running off to her next stop. “They’re a part of what you do everyday and where you go.” Go to www.tecasan.com. To read more about Niki’s journey through the Southern states, check out her blog atshoetales.blogspot.com. 46 CITY http://www.tecasan.com http://atshoetales.blogspot.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 51

Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment The City Life Fast Food Fit Field Trip The Suite Life Paint the Town Red Fresh Tracks After the Sunset One City, Many Destinations The Winning Photographer The Entries By the Numbers The Finalists Expert Opinion Amateur Hour Meet the Finalists Nowhere Man Dune Raiders Just Go Where To Buy It Socials Icon

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