It’s 10am, the second day of Paris Fashion Week and we’re about to try and ‘fleetingly skim’ around Welcome Edition without seeing anyone we know. Oh, and we brought the rain to Paris with us too so lots of brilliantly understated fashion week fits were marred with cheap umbrellas and of course any of brits felt right at home.

More interestingly, we stopped off at the KEEN UNEEK exhibition where we were able to bag some custom UNEEKS (technicolour bungee cords!) and have a chat with Rory Fuerst, co-founder of KEEN and the innovator behind the sandal that has become a cornerstone to so many summer wardrobes.

The concept is simple; Two cords, one sole – but the road to formation was slow and littered with plenty of hurdles. Rory’s vision was to work with rope and not dilute the design with the addition of stitching or flat materials. He demonstrated this by picking up what he later realised was a paper copy of his calendar for the week and lacerating it with scissors to illustrate how flexible something becomes when perforated and how counter-intuitive it can be use flat materials to house a subject as contoured and unique as the human foot.

We fervently agreed and observed the uptake we’d seen the silhouette have just within the two mile radius of our office, also noting that the sandal had garnered significant popularity in Japan too. Its design resonating with their consumers love of unconventional, imaginative and yet practical sensibilities. A corded construction with unlikely but undeniable global appeal and certainly one of the most interesting developments in recent sneaker-sandal hybrid history.

So back to how it was conceived.. from those initial thoughts about flexibility and perforation it took Rory three days to realise his idea in a physical form, this prototype then became the first in a long line of iterations and four years later we arrive at the coveted Uneek. Rory described the seemingly infinite walls he came up against along the way when it came to navigating manufacturing, materials and just running short on creative flow but the message is still the same. Challenging the text-book way of making things can be exciting, fruitful and might just result in the most comfortable sandals in the world.

True to their name the, the UNEEK’s unconventional look has secured them as a streetwear favourite and the brand continues to have a strong foothold on the industry with all of us poised to see what Rory cooks up next.

Find out more about KEEN here