While Romain Kremer’s position as Creative Director of Camper shoes was officialised in 2014, the former CD of Thierry Mugler menswear (as well as his own extremely avant-garde, eponymous label) has an unmistakeable signature that has been present at the Mallorca-based house since his first collaborations with them in 2006. Mr Kremer is an ardent Instagrammer and his website- slash-moodboard (romainkremer.com) is a window into his many tastes and talents. This author remembers being at a fashion event in Paris around 2005 and having a fellow reveller reverently whisper Mr Kremer’s name just as the young designer was making his debuts in the style capital: “You’ll be hearing a lot about Romain Kremer.” His early work is remembered for a darkly sophisticated, if somewhat dystopian, sensual futurism. His creations for his own label mined deep menswear history (think: breeches and tights) in one season only to pivot the next to a radically different style vocabulary (chiselled ephebes in shocking pink or hypertrophic athletic gear, say, or looks that seem to have goose-stepped out of some eroticised future police state).
With Lady Gaga’s stylist-célèbre, Nicola Formichetti, he helped wake the sleeping house of Mugler with highly photogenic menswear that re-channelled the house’s codes of fetish, uniform and fantasy into covetable chunks of editorial-friendly retail. So it might seem an odd choice for a young designer whose reputation was built on the radical edge of progressive design to head up a 40-year-old upper-mid range Spanish shoe manufacturer whose name, in dialect, means “rustic” or “peasant.” But Camper is itself a revolutionary house whose founder’s ancestors went to England to learn industrial cobbling. The house’s first shoe—the Camaleón—was a sustainable unisex model made from scraps of surplus leather, canvas and old tyres. Camper’s advertising is a stand-alone library of cutting edge graphic design. Kremer continues this tradition with provocative advertisements steeped in dreamy and somewhat alienating visuals. He was kind enough to talk to us about his plans for the brand.
MATTHEW HICKS: Can you tell me about the CamperLab stores?
ROMAIN KRAMER: Well, that’s a very interesting opening question actually. CamperLabs are places where we are 100% in line with the essence of the product. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past two or three years but we are now going towards a new concept. We are creating a new kind of store in Paris, London and New York where we’ll be working on a totally different approach. If you go into one of these stores you’ll find a capsule collection that is only sold at that location and nowhere else alongside other collaborations that we are doing. It’ll be a more high-end overview.
MH: What do you mean by overview?
RK: Everything will be the top of the pyramid of the brand.
MH: More exclusive?
RK: Well, it’s also in the location we have chosen to target the audience we want. The goal is not to turn the brand into a high fashion brand. Camper is selling millions of pairs of shoes for every typology, smart shoes, casual shoes. But the idea is to bring the brand towards a more “fashion” approach while remaining true to its DNA.
MH: Camper’s advertising has been irreverent and revolutionary in its own right. I mean, the visual communication around the brand is always at least as striking and evocative as the product itself. And, as Creative Director, now you’re in charge of all of that, right?
RK: Camper is a 40-year-old company. Of those 40 years, 20 were only in Spain. They opened their first international store in Paris in ‘95 and since then they’ve continued to grow and now they’re basically everywhere. And their communication has been an essential part of that.
MH: And you have brought a contemporary artworld sensibility to that. I’m thinking of the recent work with Pandemonia [Pandemonia Panacea— an anonymous performance artist, blogger and journalist who appears only in blonde blow-up doll drag—the inflatable muse for Kremer’s revolutionary single-piece foam-moulded Kobara shoe] and Charlie le Mindu [another Gaga alum whose 2016 haute-coiffure and hair sculpture retrospective “CHARLIEWOOD” was a smash at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris] who both bring a kind of avant-garde sensibility to Camper’s visual communication that was perhaps there at the beginning but had gone away a bit before your arrival. How did that come about?
RK: Well, as with any brand, over the decades Camper had different product directions. With Camper there was always a sense of humour and irreverence. Remember that Mr Fluxà was a part of the whole Movida and [Camper’s] creations have always sort of been targeted at creative people. So when I arrived it became obvious that one of my strengths was to push Camper in this direction but yet another was to teach people about Camper’s roots in this kind of creativity.
MH: You work mostly with leather and rubber now. What are some things that only people who work with those materials would know about them?
RK: Well first there is the whole technique of shoemaking, which is totally different [from prêtà-porter]. And then there is the whole dimension of price restriction, which is to say: “How can we work with the price restriction to make something a little crazy, a little creative?” And, for example, the foam outsole, which is so essential to the design of the shoe, is also the result of price consciousness. We can’t do some sort of €800 Goodyear stitching sort of shoe. And then there is something that’s neither a question of price nor a restriction, but of the kind of shoe one is buying: not really a sneaker but not really a “smart” shoe. I mean Camper has always been a casual shoe brand but what does that mean today? Everyone is doing “sneakers” and we are something else.
MH: A unique category of footwear?
RK: Yes, and I think it is clear that I have always been into a kind of hybridization. That’s something I’ve always loved about clothes: that you cannot tell really what it is. So for me this was the perfect place. I’ve always done that, even when I was doing ready-to-wear, you know, mixing plastic and cashmere for example. And this kind of unclassifiable shoe, for me, is what Camper is all about. The highest compliment for me would be, like, “What the fuck is that shoe?”
MH: Speaking of which, what the fuck is the Kobarah shoe? Where did that come from? Did that come from material constraint or did you get a particularly tricky design brief…?
RK: That was quite a challenge. That shoe’s entire construction comes out of one mould. Camper had a successful line called “Wabi” and my challenge was to revisit that with glamour and humour. So we took some strips of plasticine and tried to find the most impossible way to arrange it on the foot so that you could still wear it but the shoe would be one solid piece. That was a nightmare to get right.
Originally published in Dapper Dan magazine 14, 2016. Interview by Matthew Hicks.