Helen Kirkum and ASICS Reimagine Garage Sale Treasures for Second Collaboration
Celebrating the wellbeing of people through sports.
It has been a busy year for London-based footwear designer Helen Kirkum. In February, Kirkum unveiled her first-ever venture with ASICS, a micro collection of bespoke GEL-1090 sneakers inspired by the Japanese label’s bedrock “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body.” The duo celebrated sports as a way to improve one’s mental health by supporting children’s charity Right to Play.
Only a few months ago, the Royal College of Art graduate presented her first-ever ready-to-wear sneaker, Palimpsest, as part of the official London Fashion Week schedule. The launch represented an innovative and exciting milestone for the studio, in line with its made-to-order ethos. Now, the post-consumer waste champion returns with a second collaboration with ASICS to mark Footpatrol’s 20th anniversary.
The exciting partnership continues the brands’ Crafts for Minds project, a mission to nurture the well-being of people through sports. Inspired by the excitement of garage sales and the uniqueness of unwanted stock, each pair from the collaboration is one-of-a-kind, handmade from ASICS offcuts in Kirkum’s studio. The silhouettes are crafted using five different ASICS models as a base; GEL-LYTE III, GEL-NANDI OG, GEL-PRELEUS, GEL-KAYANO 14 and the GEL-KAYANO 5 OG.
Kirkum used offcuts of the ASICS logo from her previous collab as a starting point; a unique way to connect the projects together and a reminder that newness isn’t always best. The collaged emblem is split across each pair, with further offcuts embedded into them, a distinctive and crucial element in the release. Kirkum has produced a total of 20 distinctly individual pairs that feature their own unique collage of materials.
As per the designer, “We love doing these projects, it gives us a chance to be creative, wild with design and not conform to the norm, things that we couldn’t create in factory-made production. All the scraps that comprise the sneakers are mixed together to create a vibrant collage aesthetic – for the theme of the project, we wanted to reimagine a traditional British garage sale.”
She continues, “When I was thinking about pieces I had to use and the offcuts to utilize, as well as these oddly mismatched silhouettes we collected, it reminded me of a garage sale where everything’s muddled up and you can find some amazing gems among that. We created recognizable accents with our embroidered tongue patches, using neon thread throughout to capture a vintage garage sale feel. We finished off all pairs with our signature blanket stitch around the toe, which you see on many of our handmade collaborations, adding the element of craft and texture that we love in all our products.”
On November 18, each pair will be raffled off on the Footpatrol Launches app. The total of the proceeds from the sales will go going to the organisation Young Minds.
In other footwear news, Mowalola dropped the highly anticipated New Balance 90/60 collab.
