The Fashion Plate Magazine

Raise your hand if you recognize this shoe.
If you own this shoe, you can also raise your hand.
For those of you who don’t know, this is a design by Nicholas Kirkwood!

Nicholas Kirkwood rose to fame for this shoe and for every style he created that resembled this shoe starting from the late 1990s to 2006. Nicholas Kirkwood shoes were like magnets for celebrities and socialites, everyone from Victoria Beckham to Beyonce wore these shoes! And designers loved him as well!  Kirkwood has created catwalk-versions of this shoe for Ghost, John Rocha, Erdem, Rodarte and Pollini.

And then flat shoes took over the world. Last time we saw Nicholas Kirkwood he was hosting parties for MatchesFashion.com with China Chow.

Somehow he lost the magic. His shoes became “the staple shoe” – but hey, Gigi Hadid wears them!

Don’t get us wrong, we LOVE Nicholas Kirkwood circa 2004! He was a shoe-spiration! Which is why his new collaboration with Bulgari caused quite a stir in the TFP office.

Typically this would fall under the ‘topics trending’ category but a bag collaboration of this magnitude deserves a bit of history.

Bulgari is known for seeking out the hottest artists for collaboration, especially when it comes to the eponymous Serpintine line. It turns out, Bulgari invited the British footwear designer to revisit the purse line in particular. Bulgari wanted Kirkwood’s contemporary style applied to more functional products which included a new backpack and shoulder bag.

Nicholas Kirkwood delivered with this graphic chevron pattern he created with varnished studs and a mix of flat, round and matte pyramidal buttons. He also added a new twist to the enameled snake head clasp that adorns the backpacks and shoulder bags – it’s got a bit of a Spiderman effect. You see it too?

The color palette is in the oh so trendy gemstone colors, such as pink spinel and royal sapphire.

Nicholas Kirkwood says he drew design inspiration directly from the Bulgari archives.

“I created the chevron patterns using rubberized studs which have faceted ends that reminded me of diamond settings and some of the spectacular gemstones I had seen in the Bulgari High Jewelry atelier in Rome,”

Nicholas Kirkwood

And of course there was only one person they could possibly choose to be the face of this new collaboration, no, not Gigi – Bella!

Do you think it was a good effort? Tell us what you think, comment in the section below!