It sounds counterintuitive to want to feel the ground through your shoes, but not to Mikio Sakabe. The Japanese designer first explored the idea in 2018 through his label, Giddy Up, which offered 3D-printed sneakers that bore less resemblance to shoes than to retro-futuristic furniture. When the label was rebranded as Grounds in 2019, Sakabe’s footwear designs became even bolder. One of the first silhouettes he introduced was the Jewelry shoe, whose soles look like beads on a necklace. The soles’ purpose, aside from attracting attention, is to make you feel like you are walking on something fluffy, or even floating.
“My biggest dream is to change the relationship between humans and gravity,” shares Sakabe, who was in town for the launch of Grounds’s pop-up in Club21 at Como Orchard. At the entrance of the store, Sakabe’s design experiments are on display: there’s an installation of Grounds shoes suspended in the air, including a Mary Jane shoe mounted on a sculptural heel that seems to be dripping with wax. That particular shoe is still a prototype—for now.
Grounds’s wearable—but no less novel—designs could be found at the pop-up upstairs. There’s the Jewelry Mary Jane, one of the Grounds designs worn by K-pop girl group NewJeans in their Super Shy music video. There’s also the Moopie Mary Jane, which is big on Tiktok, and literally so in real life, owing to its blown-up, bubble-like soles. The Moopie Mary Jane Chrome shoes, which are exclusive to Club21, look like they have a bit of bright-coloured gum stuck to their shiny, metallic soles. How does Sakabe come up with this stuff?
“Basically, I just walk around Tokyo and look at people on the street,” says the 48-year-old designer. “Tokyo is one of the most fashionable cities in the world. If I just walk around, there’s so much style that I can see. I start from there.”
Sakabe goes on to compare his creative process to those of Japanese manga artists: “I draw inspiration from ordinary people, but I design in a strong, exaggerated way. I want to turn something normal into something special.”
Sakabe’s avant-garde approach isn’t limited to shoes. The designer says he got used to coming up with “super weird” concepts as a student at the Fashion Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The Belgium school is known for producing singular fashion talents: its alumni includes Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester, and Sakabe counted Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia as his classmate. Upon graduation, Sakabe started his eponymous fashion label in 2007, and has since shown his collections at both Tokyo and Paris Fashion Week. Like his footwear, Sakabe’s womenswear and menswear are anything but ordinary; his designs are influenced by anime, manga, architecture, nightlife and, of course, the streets of Tokyo. In 2019, Sakabe also founded Me School, where he trains and mentors the next generation of fashion designers in Japan.
From all his years in fashion, it’s clear that Sakabe embraces new ideas and different perspectives. Similarly, at Grounds, he works closely with his design team. He says, “I decide the direction, but my team members may have their own design ideas that I don’t want to deny or change. So I just mix everything together.”
To mix things up even more, Grounds also has a string of standout collaborations. The label has created spike-covered sneakers with Antwerp Six designer Walter Van Beirendonck; recycled denim loafers with emerging Chinese designer Yueqi Qi; and an array of colourful shoes featuring shark fin details and thick, liquorice-like laces with Bernhard Willhelm.
Coming up with such crazy concepts is one thing; bringing them to life is another. Grounds co-founder Yusuke Hotchi emphasises the challenge of even presenting an idea for a shoe, asking “Sketches are always 2D, so how can you design in 3D?”
The answer is sculpture: the Grounds team does away with drawings and presents their ideas with clay prototypes instead. Those models go a long way in convincing manufacturers to produce Grounds’s fashion-forward footwear.
“For almost all of our designs, the factories [we approached] have said that it’s not possible to make them,” says Sakabe. Instead of being discouraged, he sees that rejection as inevitable when it comes to innovation. “That means we have a new design,” he elaborates. “If they say it’s not possible, that is a good sign. But if they say it is possible, we’re afraid it already exists.”
Today, Grounds’s shoes are produced in factories in Indonesia and China, and worn all over the world. “We have been to Los Angeles many times, and there are so many men who wear our shoes with a hip-hop style,” shares Sakabe. Hotchi attests to that, adding, “It’s super nice to see all the guys in L.A. with their grills and Grounds shoes.”
For Sakabe, such unexpected styling of their designs is a welcome surprise. “I always like seeing someone who is not really a Grounds type of person wear our shoes,” he says. “It’s interesting to see, and I’m inspired a lot by people like that.”
Sakabe may soon encounter even more eclectic combinations as Grounds goes global. The Japanese brand is holding its first presentation at Paris Fashion Week this September, and it will build onto Sakabe’s goal of reimagining gravity. The designer also intends to break boundaries beyond the world of shoes: he wants to expand the Grounds universe with accessories like bags and sunglasses. We got a glimpse of the former in Grounds’s Spring/Summer 2024 collection, which included transparent tote bags featuring the brand’s signature Jewelry soles at the bottom. But Grounds sunglasses? Those are a little harder for us to picture. “I think I can,” says Sakabe with a smile.
Below, Sakabe tells GRAZIA Singapore more about his favourite shoe from Grounds’s Spring/Summer 2024 collection: the Moopie Jellyfish Sandal, the brand’s first-ever sandals.
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