Let the scales fall from your eyes…A French shoe manufacturer is
urging fashionistas to take the plunge with what he claims is the world’s
first range of trout skin espadrille shoes. Jean-Jacques Houyou has set out
to persuade his compatriots that they should be wearing trout rather than
merely eating them with a caper and black butter sauce.
The stack-heeled women’s sandals in seven colours will go on sale in France
this summer, selling for around 120 euros (135 US dollars) a pair.
Houyou has sourced salmon trout for the shoes — whose skins he claims are
particularly beautiful — from the cold mountain streams of the renowned
Banca
valley in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the French Basque country.
All come the Goicoechea family’s fish farm, whose trout are prized by
gourmets. And although his company is called Don Quichosse — a play on Don
Quixote
— Houyou insisted he was not tilting at watermills. He admitted however
that making the espadrilles was an “extremely exacting process, the most
difficult thing is to find two skins with the same marks which makes each
pair so original,” he told AFP.
“Every pair is different because of the material itself,” he said of the
handmade shoes which are lined with goat skin.
Houyou has previously made Japanese-style sandals with salmon skin at his
small factory in Mauleon, the centre of France’s espadrille industry.
Most of his 10 shoemakers work in their homes turning out 20,000 pairs of
espadrilles a year, which traditionally have soles made of jute.
But he has used cork to sole the trout skin shoes, which come with heels in
two heights.
Espadrilles, often made of canvas, can trace their lineage back 4,000
years, and are still hugely popular summer shoes. They are also much more
eco-friendly than mass market footwear which is difficult, and sometimes
almost impossible to recycle.
Several luxury shoe brands have also embraced what they term “fish leather” for
their shoes, with the Spanish designer Manolo Blahnik once creating
800-euros-a-pair
sandals for an “eco shoes” range.
The Brazilian label Osklen has also had great success with it salmon skin
Arpoador sneakers, which sell for 580 US dollars. It has previously made
shoes from the skin of the Amazonian arapaima fish. Fish skin boots have
been worn for thousands of years by Inuit peoples, and fish skin shoes and
handbags were common in Germany during World War II when
cow leather ran out.
Environmentalists say that that countless tonnes of tannable fish skins
are
discarded every year because the public still worries wrongly that they
might
smell fishy. (AFP)
Photos: AFP