Caterina Belluardo is a young designer from sunny and warm Sicily, who decided to study at the Royal College of Art in London where, in contact with the most bold creativity, she graduated in Fashion Menswear, and later specialised in footwear design. This way she managed to succeed, in the grey English capital, to realize her dream, translated into MEmphis MEets ME, the shoe collection that she just presented at White in Milan. Unique items in which took life her passion for bright colors, lines, graphics and geometric shapes, don’t forgetting Italian roots, being inspired by the Memphis movement, founded by Ettore Sottsass and protagonist of postmodernist design in the Italy of the 1980s. Italy and England therefore coexist in Caterina’s design in a shoe, for both men and women, with handmade construction from a small family-run workshop in the East End of London. Typical English footwear codes, as the leather sole and the fringes of the derby, get dressed in contemporaneity, stealing from bowling shoe, but also by the boxing boots until the Scottish brogue. The upper elements light up in colorful nabuck, beside optical grafics and most of all the designer’s trademark: hand-knitted details reminiscent of old colorful sweaters, where fully manifests the inspiration to the late 1980s of her childhood.
