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Move over Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin. Meet the world’s most innovative shoe designer, and he’s from Yorkshire

Words: Irma Heger

His revolutionary Mojito shoe - resembling a twist of citrus peel - has been worn by

Gwyneth Paltrow and Zandra Rhodes and ordered by stylists for Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.

Not bad for a chap from the East Riding, who grew up near Ellerton, a place to which he returned in 2012.

Julian Hakes, who has two young sons, loves living on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. It also means he’s near his brother Anthony, a property lawyer

His parents, Pat and David Hakes, were teachers in the area for 40 years, and his grandfather was a dock master in Hull.

It’s from these roots that he shot to fame as a global shoe-making sensation, featuring in Vogue, Forbes, Wall Street Journal and Elle, with showrooms in London, Paris, Munich, New York, LA and Hong Kong.

LEFT: Julian Hakes. Photo: Peer LindgreenABOVE: One of Julian’s innovative shoes

Best foot forward for Julian

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Ridings magazine

Julian, who’s 41, ditched the tried-and-tested conventional shoe, a move seemingly inspired by the kind of creative thinking encouraged by his father during his Yorkshire childhood.

‘My entire life was a school lesson,’ Julian smiled. ‘Everywhere we went, he’d ask: “Do you know why this is?” My dad made us very inquisitive; you’ve heard of Edward de Bono, lateral thinking? “That’s what we did for fun”!’

Julian’s background is actually in architecture and engineering. He was just a fresh-faced architecture student

student Cari-Jane. Running a company from student digs involved hot-footing it down the hall to answer the communal phone, in case it was a client, before anybody else could...

Later, Julian taught at Cambridge and ran an architect’s practice with Cari-

Jane in London, designing buildings and bridges in Moscow, the Middle East, Europe and USA.

But one night in 2006, he decided to

to design a shoe. Outlining his bare feet on tracing paper, he noticed only the pad of the heel and the ball of the foot touched the surface, so the bridging part of a shoe proved redundant. Many 3D designs later, Julian sent a picture of his new-fangled shoe to an architectural design website called Dezeen. That

viral, clocking up 100,000 hits while its creator slept.

Overnight, Julian had become a sought-after shoe ‘architect’. Using the latest materials, technologies and design methods, he re-invented the shoe into something futuristic and arty, which

collection even won the prestigious

Drapers Footwear and Accessories Award in 2012.

‘There’s a real demand for a shoe that has been designed and is elegant and sculptural,’ said Julian. ‘The shoes are comfortable, my wife loves them, and she has been a guinea pig since day one.’

Although Julian now travels the world on shoe-business and lived in France not along ago, he loves nothing better than coming back home.

‘I love the weather in Yorkshire, and there is no such thing as bad weather - just bad clothing. I love a good walk in the woods, the Pennines or moors, and I recently rediscovered the amazing

Bay, known by locals as K10, and Scarborough.I feel my roots will always be in Yorkshire, but being so close to Leeds Airport is brilliant as it is a short connection to Heathrow and then onwards to the USA, Asia or Europe.’

Julian’s innovative shoes

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