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At the end of last year, while working on the Fall 2019 collection for her cult jewelry brand turned streetwear label Ambush, designer Yoon Ahn found herself gravitating towards new and unfamiliar territory: footwear. “I wanted to make something that would go with the collection,” she explains over the phone from her studio in Tokyo. “I wanted these rubber boots that were military-inspired or very utilitarian, and I had ’50s U.S. cold-weather bunny boots on the mood board.”
Lo and behold, she swiftly received a call from Nike—with whom she had already begun collaborating, not long after being named Kim Jones’s jewelry director at Dior Men last spring—inviting her to visit the Converse headquarters in Boston, with a view to developing a new shoe design. “It was just perfect timing,” she says. “I brought the images of the bunny boots, and the design team told me, ‘You know, we used to produce these.’ Everything felt like it was meant to be.”
With two of the brand’s most iconic styles—the classic Chuck Taylor and the Pro Leather—as a starting point, Ahn began toughening up the classic silhouettes with layers of rubber. The resulting chunky, extraterrestrial sole is in keeping with the primary inspiration behind the corresponding Ambush collection: Nicolas Roeg’s David Bowie–starring sci-fi classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth. In iterations of black and white, the sneakers have a futuristic feel that is tempered with a winking dose of humor; look closer, and you’ll notice instructions on the Chuck 70’s outside panel to “keep double laced to hold firmly.”
While the kicks clearly bear Ahn’s playful stamp, they’re still embedded in the history of the Converse brand. “If I’m doing a collaboration with something that iconic, I don’t want to take it to a place where you can’t even recognize them,” she says. “I try to keep the heritage side of those pieces, but also think, What can we bring in 2019? Can we make something that people will want to wear next year, or that people have never seen before?”
It’s this ability to balance her own distinctive outlook with the creative vision of others that has made her various fashion cosigns such a hit, as well as her prudent selection of collaborators she trusts and admires, and from whom she wants to learn. “It’s really about teamwork,” says Ahn. “I can suggest ideas, but there are certain things that are just impossible to do or can’t go into production, and I have to respect that, because it’s their territory. That boundary then pushes me to come up with a different idea, and sometimes that plan B or plan C becomes even better than the plan A that you initially talked about.” This push-and-pull dynamic clearly works: the Converse collaboration was first previewed all the way back in January, but a quick skim of Ahn’s Instagram comments is enough to tell you that anticipation ahead of the drop on October 19 is already reaching a fever pitch.
As a designer whose work is inspired by the everyday—from her best-selling Duchampian clothespin earrings to her cigarette lighter necklaces—there’s no better starting point for Ahn than a shoe as deeply woven into the fabric of pop culture as the Converse sneaker. “I always think, How can I take something that’s quite familiar to people, or something that gets overlooked, and make it exciting?” she says. “Maybe it’s because I’m self-taught as a jewelry designer, so I have a different point of view. But I always want to take common objects and redefine or reintroduce them in a way so that people can look at them differently and find beauty in them.”