Stepney Workers Club x Studio Hagel EXP1
A Perpetual Pursuit to the Final Design
Words by Grace Warn
Mathieu Hagelaars and Roger Pereira can give backing to Hepburn’s venerable statement: Paris is always a good idea. But, far from the soul-searching of 1990s Sabrina, Paris provided the two fringe footwear designers with the creative catalyst for the beginning of their experimental making relationship. Hagelaars and Pereira, respective founders of Studio Hagel and Stepney Workers Club turned a catch up with friends into the start of an ever-evolving design programme. After the launch of the collaborator’s first footwear drop EXP1, CONCEPTKICKS picked their brains on vulcanisation, manual treatments and future EXPs.
“I think as a designer, you're never finished. If you're finished, you should stop designing,” explains Hagelaars, laying the groundwork for the spirit of the new collaboration. Not only is this narrative printed on the tongue tab of the EXP1s, but it is also one that he applies throughout his exclusively ubiquitous work. Whether you’ve heard of MakersMondays or have a penchant for Virgil Abloh, Takashi Murakami and Puma, you’ve undoubtedly stumbled upon one of Mathieu Hagelaar’s many touched corners of footwear design.
Fig 1. Initial Inspiration
Pereira, who co-founded SWC with Simon See in 2018 with the sole aim of producing the perfect vulcanised sneaker has dedicated his design to the bygone process lorded over by Vans and Converse. Although his passion for vulc is palpable, as with any forefront designer, Pereira is in touch with the pitfalls of his design process: “When you go on the journey of having a brand and designing products, you really learn the limitations of the process and materials you specialise in. For me, it’s vulcanised shoes. There’s a lot of things you can do with it but there's a hell of a lot of things you can't do.”
What better way to turn your limitations into future innovations than by getting the man who believes a design is never finished to get hands-on with your product. “We literally said let’s fuck about with some foxing!” shares Hagelaars, giving us a glimpse into the organic starting point of the design programme founded on WhatsApp brainstorms, rough sketches and happy mistakes.
“For me, the rubber foxing on vulcanised shoes is what sets it apart from other footwear constructions, so it made sense to celebrate that and muck about with it,” shares Pereira. If you’ve slipped your feet into Dunlops, Converse, Vans, or the like, you too will be acquainted with the statement, come sealant, quintessential foxing tape.
“We just wanted to make it known that vulcanised shoes are the product of a skilled process. It’s a very labour-intensive process that involves people at every stage…”
Roger Pereira, Co-founder of SWC
Fig 2. Tape Experiment
Sported first in the 1870s, vulcanised rubber and canvas plimsolls made their mark on the feet of holidaymakers for the first time thanks to inventors Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock. In the early 1800s, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, both men started to play with the performance of rubber. In the race to file patency, both men found that by mixing sulphur with natural rubber and adding heat, cross link polymers are produced. These novel bonds form the basis of a more durable, flexible and resistant vulcanised rubber.
Foxing is placed around the outside midsole of vulcanised shoes, it provides the material bond between the textile upper and the outsole of the shoes. But, far from the bygone applications, SWC x Hagel’s EXP1s lift foxing out of the world necessity and into the arena of style. “We focused on the idea of covering,” explains Hagelaars, he continues: “Roger sent a bunch of pairs over to the studio and we added extra foxing. The application of a really thin foxing over the S-Strike identifier gives the shoes a manual treatment.”
Fig 3. Sample Development
The new styles force SWC’s perfected vulcanised Dellow and Varden sneakers into the avant-garde. Coming in two colourways – black or ecru – the four-piece collection plays with layering, textures, and brand identity. At first glance the foxing additives are applied perfectly in all the wrong places. Sidewall rubber foxing is applied to obscure the SWC emblem and other key brand identifiers. This almost-translucent textured foxing on the uppers is juxtaposed by an impenetrable black foxing overlays the sole unit that culminates in a hand-treated pucker at the heel. Like the two creators, the shoe is birthed from the perfect balance of creativity and homage to the integrity of vulcanised shoes.
“All of the extra foxings and the lip at the back of the shoe are not precise or uniform between the pairs,” sets out Pereira, highlighting the importance of hand-finishing in not only this design but also the vulcanisation process as a whole. He continues: “We just wanted to make it known that vulcanised shoes are the product of a skilled process. It’s a very labour-intensive process that involves people at every stage, it’s not like an injection mould process where the mould comes out, gets attached to a sole and then off you go!”
Fig 4. Ecru Varden
As well as negotiating and reclaiming the limitations of vulcanised footwear, Hagelaars admits that it was a challenge to reframe his thinking surrounding the vulc design process: “Vulc presents a slightly different way of working for me, I had to have a wider imagination because not only could I not get the design apart and change things once it was vulcanised, I also wanted to stay away from the deconstruct, reconstruct collage design which is always the first thing I think to do when playing with vulc.”
Not only have the pair created one-of-one designs that are bound to get people talking, but their activation campaign is also designed to cultivate questions. The first seeded pairs were dropped in EXP branded art crates which was accompanied by a crowbar, blurring the lines between function and unfinished, Hagelaars has succeeded in his aim of getting people to ask, “what the fuck is going on over here!?”. The Amsterdam-based designer shares just how he was able to create such a stand-out campaign: “We had to create some kind impact with the budget we had, and Roger was cool about how I wanted to do it. To me, this is what makes a true collaboration, both bringing in ideas at each stage of design to elevate the end result.”
With the black colourway already for sale and the ecru one dropping imminently, the boundary pushing pair haven’t given themselves time to revel in the end result – because this edition is a far cry from the future EXPs. After all, the process is so intuitive that Hagelaars and Pereira agree that each future EXP drop will be a departure from the last whilst on call with us. With the ease of a 12-year-nurtured friendship rapport, the team admit that we could probably see the references, photos, and shots-in-the-darks for EXP three, four and five.
As this relationship evolves, shoes continue to drop and vulcanised design gets spotlighted in ways it never has before, the phrase “Paris est toujours une bonne idée” will always endure.
DALLOW AND VARDEN EXP 1 SUEDE BLACK: now available via select retailers and Stepney Worker’s Club online store with Suede Ecru releasing 19th of June.