The Wool Shoe Collaboration
the wool shoe collaboration
Meet The Wool Shoe. A collaboration between Stella Harry Lee and Herderin, two Bay Area designers looking at the materials that surround them everyday and asking — what can become of this? How can we incorporate what is already here into something functional, something necessary? A subtle statement that, in a different time, wouldn’t be a statement at all, but in a world of overconsumption and petroleum-dominant materialism, using what is in front of us is an act of resistance; Creating our own means for ourselves and local community is an act of resistance.
The climate crisis is dire, and the fashion industry is an active contributor through its linear fast fashion model that has dominated the scene. This industry, among others, have fueled the American consumerism and materialism values, lifelong embedded philosophies in how we look at the things around us. But there is a difference between what we want and what we need. At its core, the fashion industry stemmed from the basic human necessity of clothing ourselves — protecting our bodies, communicating through textiles, storytelling through creation.
The Wool Shoe Collaboration is exactly that: A story of anti-consumerism, of respecting place, of being in process through our own self-discoveries of how we want to recreate a system of high regard to the natural abundance that is all around us. Not extraction, but of esteem.
Stella Harry Lee is a Material Designer and Artist based in San Francisco, and Alix Vasquez of Herderin is a Qualitative Clothing Designer and Sociologist based in San Rafael. They met at last year’s SF Climate Week and instantly connected over their deep love of materials and pushing the boundaries of what textiles and wares can be, can represent. Stella has been using the medium of a shoe to explore alternative materials along with her own accumulative household waste. Herderin’s commitment to regionally-grown natural fibers from our local fibershed instantly peaked Stella’s fascination within her own circular footwear design projects.
A few months later, Stella Harry Lee and Helene Jones from Herderin, were driving north of San Francisco to Windrush Farms, a long standing working sheep farm in Chileno Valley, to meet with Mimi Luebbermann. Mimi is a fiber artist, educator, farmer, and well known community member in the Northern California Fibershed. They spent the day meeting the sheep flock, learning about healthy soil and pasture, discussing the challenges Mimi and the regional fiber industry faces, and feeling the vast variety of raw sheep fleece found in Mimi’s sunlit fiber studio.
“I fell in love with the magic that was happening there, not to romanticize it. But I do think human labor is underappreciated, around the world. If we’re thinking about localization and the local supply chain, you also have to think about the people behind it all; you have to think about how we support and pay them.”
— Stella Lee Harris
They left with Corriedale black, Corriedale white, and Shetland white raw wool, all from the sheep they had met earlier that day only 45 miles north of Stella’s studio in SF. Through the next couple of months, Stella experimented with the best ways to work with the wool while keeping the integrity and texture of this expressive fiber. She wanted the material as minimally processed as possible in order to maintain the qualities of the wool as it was on the sheep at Mimi’s farm.
The Wool Shoe is comprised of wet-felted and needle-felted washed wool, along with leather and shoe pieces sourced from O Baltor & Sons in San Francisco. Its very makeup is the expression of place and people found in our locality. An embodiment of the lives of farmers, sheep, and makers who are making their livelihood in our region, providing beautiful materials for the many manifestations of the stories we want to tell through human objects.
It’s an encouragement to you to look around. To learn, to meet the makers, the farmers, the creators. To create yourself within the local bounds of what is around you. To work with natural materials that come from this Earth, and to respect them, appreciate them, hold them in high regard.
“Your feet are the foundation of your body. It’s what aligns everything else. How you support your base is how you support your body. And it’s grounded to the earth, the connection between you and the rest of the natural world.” — Alix Vasquez, Herderin
About Stella Harry Lee
Stella Harry Lee is a SF-based material designer and artist. After years in commercial material design, Stella took a workshop on how to recycle materials at home into the shape of shoes, which brought her back to her passion on rethinking materials. This workshop, met with the stay-at-home orders during the Covid pandemic, shaped how Stella looked at what was around her in her own home. What materials were readily available — fashion waste, packing, shopping bags. She had to confront her own consumer habits and waste, which began to influence how she looked at design. Something had felt missing before, and she realized she hadn’t been designing with the product’s end-of-life in mind and where it would go after the user.
“How much are we making? Why are we producing so much? Why am I buying so much? I had to answer my own consumption of things. I was very much confronted by that.” This began Stella’s circular design footwear project, experimenting with readily available materials: from microgreens, household waste, to mycelium. From there, Stella looked beyond her own home and realized how much was available in her own bioregion, especially wool. Stella’s ultimate hope is to, along with many people, build a new system; one that doesn’t abide by the current system. One focused on producing locally and thinking about every product’s end-of-life cycle, its potential for biodegradability and returning back to the Earth.
We love community collaboration. If you’re an artist, maker, designer and want to collaborate with Herderin, please reach out to us.