Kanye West gave fans plenty to talk about on social media with his recent YZYSZN 9 presentation at Paris Fashion Week. While most of the headlines focus on the “shocking” “White Lives Matter” T-shirts the rapper-turned-designer wore during the show, the polarizing presentation highlighted new 3D printed boots created by technology company Zellerfeld in a weekend.
The German 3D printed footwear company was founded in 2020 by CEO Cornelius Schmitt, and leverages a proprietary 3D printing system to manufacture custom footwear – in their entirety – out of TPU material. Their machine could 3D print TPU in a variety of textures. Needless to say that with a 100% thermoplastic material, Zellerfeld’s creations can all be recyclable.
As far as the collaboration with West (now Ye) is concerned, no official name has been given yet to the new footwear – neither its price, nor its potential availability within stores. Zellerfeld said in its statement that the boots are the same ones that have been circulating online since the first Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga drop.
While 3D printing has enabled to reduce drastically the creation of process of the footwear – from months to a weekend basically, we have to admit that Zellerfeld did not bother itself to create an extraordinary pleasing finishing look.
That being said, Zellerfeld has been growing slowly but surely by collaborating with people closely associated with the multihyphenate on footwear projects. In October 2021 for instance, Heron Preston launched the beta version of his 3D-printed sneaker, the Heron01, which was done in collaboration with Zellerfeld. The shoe debuted exclusively via StockX the same month.
A journey that started with just 8 printers will continue with about 200 printers at the company Germany-based site in the near future.
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