Safa Sahin.

We know not what the Metaverse actually entails or what it really means. But should our virtual avatars need footwear to step into the digital dunes of that world, then Safa Sahin has got us covered. As Balmain’s current head sneaker designer, Sahin has been given carte blanche to bring to fruition the fantasy sneakers of his unbounded dreams. One look at his shoe specimens for Balmain with its freeform lines, undulating waves and Gehry-shaped soles and you can see them bouncing on the feet of our Second Life selves. Except Sahin also has the cordwainer nous to make his shoes a tangible reality.

Born in Yozgat, Turkey, Sahin graduated from the Turkish Shoemakers Industrialists Institute Foundation and went on to obtain a BA from Selçuk University, while literally finding his feet with his own boutique brand. Sneakers never figured in Sahin’s formative shoe design years until later on. ‘I never imagined that I would be designing sneakers. At school I learned about high heels and was designing classic shoes for different companies. There is no sneaker culture really in Istanbul. But then I discovered Yohji Yamamoto’s first sneaker with Adidas. When I saw this, I went crazy.’

Yamamoto’s iconic Qasa shoe for Y-3 showed Sahin that sneakers could go beyond functionality and performance, and suddenly he started sketching out his own fantastical sneakers and putting them out into the world through Instagram. ‘I set myself the goal of posting everyday. I thought about Steve Jobs’s speech at Stanford about putting little dots every day so that one day they will connect and you can build something big, because I wanted to be successful. It’s a competitive industry and I was living in Istanbul. I didn’t study at Saint Martins or IFM. I really NEEDED to be successful.’

The disciplined posting drive paid off when, on the strength of Sahin’s out-of-this-world shoe sketches, suddenly job offers were coming his way from the sportswear titans that had prompted his initial sneaker obsession. Sahin landed the dream job at Nike, treating their campus HQ in Portland like a school, immersing himself fully into the ins and outs of sneaker design and culture while adopting the ‘chill out, relax, healthy and green’ Portlandia spirit. ‘I told Nike I have a really big passion about shoes. Just there’s one problem: I don’t have English. They said, “Don’t worry, just design for us.” And so after work was done at 5pm, someone would come and teach me English. And during the day, all I did was draw crazy and inspirational sneakers.’

Sahin was effectively there to provide the crazy sneaker seeds, formed into paper maquettes that would give way to more viable designs. Maybe the language barrier left Sahin free to sketch at will and go wild with his shoe models. ‘Sketching is a language for me! Design is my language. At meetings at Nike, I really didn’t understand what they were talking about. But maybe that’s a good thing.’

After two years at Nike, brands like Jimmy Choo and Louis Vuitton came calling, eager to maintain their luxury sneaker brand momentum and shore up a product category that at the time was beginning to really hit its stride. But it was Balmain that would give Sahin the true freedom to go all out. You wouldn’t immediately associate Olivier Rousteing’s sharp-shouldered, Balmain-army energy with sneakers, but that gave Sahin the blank slate to carve out a new shoe aesthetic in what is now a significant category that segues luxury brands into streetwear territory. ‘I felt something was missing in the world of fashion sneakers. I wanted to create something unseen and unique. I had offers from other luxury houses, but when I met Olivier he really liked what I showed him. He said, “When you show me the concept of what you want to do, you’re going to be free and actually make that shoe.” That convinced me. Balmain wants to be a part of a lifestyle, and if something shifts in that lifestyle then they want to be a part of it, hence why they created a really big budget for sneakers. And why we had the flexibility to make really crazy shapes.

At Balmain, Sahin has been able to make his sketches of impossible curves and extreme shapes a working and walking reality. Take the padded pool slides with a raised sole, which debuted at the spring/summer 2022 show as part of Balmain’s public-participation music festival. From initial, more commercially minded designs, Sahin presented Rousteing and his team with a more extreme version. ‘Are you a designer or a merchandiser?’ was the question Rousteing put to Sahin, to which he affirmed that he was both. The Balmain BBold shoe, with its exaggerated standalone soles, sock boot and sandal straps, is one of their top sellers at the moment. Extremity is selling. We want extra. And Sahin is serving it in spades.

At times Sahin’s designs can be too extreme to produce, as he teeters between the basic sneaker tenet of the need for comfort and his innate intuition to create wild shapes. ‘We do sometimes challenge the advice. We do have to push the production people. Sometimes they say, for example, that after four months this shoe would become damaged. I’m constantly trying to find the right balance. Can you have this very extreme fashion shape and still have a comfortable shoe?’ With cushioning systems, air pockets and hidden spaces in the soles, Sahin is able to inflate and exaggerate his designs to cartoonish proportions. i

It’s no coincidence that one of his inspirations is Sonic the Hedgehog’s red-toed stomp. ‘After a few years I now really understand what Rousteing likes. He really likes something unexpected, something big.’

Sahin’s ambitions are now stretching beyond Balmain, as he begins to emerge from the sneakerhead insider scene to put his name to brands. There’s a Fila collaboration with his name on it that’s about to roll out, as well as freelance projects for a number of luxury houses, all seeking to find their jackpot shoe – the next Triple S or a McQueen Oversized. There are plans to bring out his own brand down the line: the ultimate Safa Sahin vision would be to encompass both sneakers and heeled shoes. But there will always be something in a sneaker that makes his vision truly tick. Hypebeasts follow, but originators like Sahin are out to uncover new ground. ‘There are more possibilities in a sneaker. They’re everywhere in our day-to-day lives and they can go from the red carpet to Starbucks. There are no limits. I don’t want to do what I’ve done before. If I work for a whole day and don’t find something new, that makes me really stressed. But if I have a new idea and the factory comes back with a prototype, then that makes me happy. Making something new makes me happy.’