Making Stuff With Yuji Okura

Skateboarders have a…thing with shoes. Most of us can recall times spent with friends talking about the intricacies of what makes one shoe superior to another, or why a certain type of sole grips better than another. Shoes are central to skateboarding, so much so that we made a whole side project around this fact.

Then there’s the consumption factor. Skateboarding lays waste to shoes in a way that no other activity (street luge maybe? we don’t know) can, which causes us to accumulate and discard shoes without much thought. This brought us to thinking: what really goes into making a shoe?

A lot, it turns out. We met up with Yuji Okura, a skater who makes shoes by hand(!) at Jieny Shoe Studio in Brooklyn and brought him the idea of recreating one of our favorites, the Cats from the now defunct IPath footwear. And recreate he surely did, specifically in the materials we requested. From making the patterns to cutting and assembling the materials to sewing everything together (again, lots of it by hand), Yuji did it all. We are beyond hyped on how these turned out, and now are proud owners of a custom blue leather pair of IPaths. In 2021. If you weren’t around for skating in the mid 2000s, IPath was as well a whole thing.

Check out the video above and the model of the shoe below, and we’ll be showing more about the shoe this week on our Instagram.

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