{"id":2635,"date":"2016-11-12T20:30:46","date_gmt":"2016-11-12T18:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/?p=2635"},"modified":"2025-10-23T15:23:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T13:23:54","slug":"romain-kremer-talks-matthew-hicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/2635\/romain-kremer-talks-matthew-hicks\/","title":{"rendered":"Romain Kremer talks to Matthew Hicks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photography by Vassilis Karidis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Romain Kremer\u2019s 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\u2019s name just as the young designer was making his debuts in the style capital: \u201cYou\u2019ll be hearing a lot about Romain Kremer.\u201d 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).<\/p>\n

With Lady Gaga\u2019s stylist-c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, Nicola Formichetti, he helped wake the sleeping house of Mugler with highly photogenic menswear that re-channelled the house\u2019s 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 \u201crustic\u201d or \u201cpeasant.\u201d But Camper is itself a revolutionary house whose founder\u2019s ancestors went to England to learn industrial cobbling. The house\u2019s first shoe\u2014the Camale\u00f3n\u2014was a sustainable unisex model made from scraps of surplus leather, canvas and old tyres. Camper\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

MATTHEW HICKS: Can you tell me about the CamperLab stores?<\/p>\n

ROMAIN KRAMER: Well, that\u2019s a very interesting opening question actually. CamperLabs are places where we are 100% in line with the essence of the product. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve 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\u2019ll be working on a totally different approach. If you go into one of these stores you\u2019ll find a capsule collection that is only sold at that location and nowhere else alongside other collaborations that we are doing. It\u2019ll be a more high-end overview.<\/p>\n

MH: What do you mean by overview?<\/p>\n

RK: Everything will be the top of the pyramid of the brand.<\/p>\n

MH: More exclusive?<\/p>\n

RK: Well, it\u2019s 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 \u201cfashion\u201d approach while remaining true to its DNA.<\/p>\n

MH: Camper\u2019s 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\u2019re in charge of all of that, right?<\/p>\n

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 \u201895 and since then they\u2019ve continued to grow and now they\u2019re basically everywhere. And their communication has been an essential part of that.<\/p>\n

MH: And you have brought a contemporary artworld sensibility to that. I\u2019m thinking of the recent work with Pandemonia [Pandemonia Panacea\u2014 an anonymous performance artist, blogger and journalist who appears only in blonde blow-up doll drag\u2014the inflatable muse for Kremer\u2019s revolutionary single-piece foam-moulded Kobara shoe] and Charlie le Mindu [another Gaga alum whose 2016 haute-coiffure and hair sculpture retrospective \u201cCHARLIEWOOD\u201d was a smash at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris] who both bring a kind of avant-garde sensibility to Camper\u2019s visual communication that was perhaps there at the beginning but had gone away a bit before your arrival. How did that come about?<\/p>\n

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 Flux\u00e0 was a part of the whole Movida and [Camper\u2019s] 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\u2019s roots in this kind of creativity.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

RK: Well first there is the whole technique of shoemaking, which is totally different [from pr\u00eat\u00e0-porter]. And then there is the whole dimension of price restriction, which is to say: \u201cHow can we work with the price restriction to make something a little crazy, a little creative?\u201d 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\u2019t do some sort of \u20ac800 Goodyear stitching sort of shoe. And then there is something that\u2019s 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 \u201csmart\u201d shoe. I mean Camper has always been a casual shoe brand but what does that mean today? Everyone is doing \u201csneakers\u201d and we are something else.<\/p>\n

MH: A unique category of footwear?<\/p>\n

RK: Yes, and I think it is clear that I have always been into a kind of hybridization. That\u2019s something I\u2019ve always loved about clothes: that you cannot tell really what it is. So for me this was the perfect place. I\u2019ve 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, \u201cWhat the fuck is that shoe?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2026?<\/p>\n

RK: That was quite a challenge. That shoe\u2019s entire construction comes out of one mould. Camper had a successful line called \u201cWabi\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Originally published in Dapper Dan magazine 14, 2016. Interview by Matthew Hicks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While Romain Kremer\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-2635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-issue-14","tag-interviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QZgE-Gv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2635"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2747,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635\/revisions\/2747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dapperdanmagazine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}