You wear them every day. They carry you. To that grimy basement party, a quiet café with a cigarette and a coffee, wandering through the city, sprinting for the last train - or just pulling your outfit together.

SHOES.

We all love a good pair of Shoes. But what is a good pair, really? Sometimes, comfort hides in discomfort.

GATA loves the odd - the strange, the offbeat - and if you look close enough, you’ll find it everywhere. Today, we’re taking you on a little trip through some of the coolest, weirdest, most offbeat shoe designs from around the world. Let’s dive in.

KEI KAGAMI

Kei Kagami is a designer from Tokyo, Japan. He first studied architecture at Meiji University, then fashion design at Bunka, and later completed an MA in Fashion Design at the renowned Central Saint Martins.

You can clearly see the fusion of architecture and fashion in his work - it often feels like you’re looking at something built, something carefully constructed and deeply structural. He rejects trends that are purely fashionable but lack depth. Instead, he works from the inside out: starting with a concept, then finding the right materials and techniques, and finally bringing it all to life.

His shoes - and his designs in general, are often exhibited rather than worn. If you ask me, though, I’d still wear them to a casual office day… even if I had to crawl to get around. Beauty is pain.

Now based in London, he keeps pushing limits, building pieces that question what fashion even is, and why we still try to wear it.

JUNKO SHIMADA

Junko Shimada is a Japanese designer based in Paris. She studied at the Sugino Gakuen Dressmaker Academy in Tokyo, then moved to France in the late ’60s, drawn by the films, the freedom, and the fashion.

Her work mixes Japanese discipline with French sensuality: sharp tailoring meets playfulness, color, and contradiction. She doesn’t chase trends - she bends them, often with humor or irony.

In her Spring 2009 collection, she sent out “Ballet Heels and Hands”- surreal shoes shaped like ballet slippers, balanced on impossible Lucite wedges, equal parts grace and discomfort. They looked fragile, but also defiant, like a dancer who refuses to fall.

It’s the same with all her work: elegance that misbehaves.

CHRIS FRANCIS

Chris Francis is a shoemaker who builds shoes the way others build cities. Every pair feels engineered; raw, structural, a little defiant.

Before shoemaking, he spent years on the move, riding freight trains, working with his hands, fixing whatever needed fixing. That sense of motion, of figuring things out from scratch, still drives his work today.

A few years ago, he traded two of his own sculptural shoes for the full archive of Pasquale Di Fabrizio; the Hollywood shoemaker who once made heels for Marilyn Monroe and boots for Sinatra. Now thousands of wooden lasts, sketches, and notes from that golden era sit in Francis’s studio, between stacks of leather and sawdust.

Chris Francis´ shoes exist somewhere between a punk gig and a museum, made to be worn, but also to be stared at.

KERMIT TESORO

Kermit Tesoro is an artist from the Philippines and footwear designer, now based in Berlin. He studied Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines and Fashion at Central Saint Martins in London - and you can tell. His work walks the line between sculpture, installation, and fashion, often blurring what’s wearable and what’s just… alive.

Tesoro’s shoes are wild; think wood, bone, rope, resin, even materials like rattan and piña fiber from the Philippines. They’re beautiful, strange, sometimes disturbing, and always deeply symbolic. Nature, identity, mythology, sex, death - it’s all there, tangled up in one pair of heels that might look like a coral reef or a fossilized creature from a dream.

He’s shown his work in exhibitions around the world, and yes - Lady Gaga wore his designs, which makes perfect sense if you’ve ever seen them. Kermits shoes are like an idea you can step into.

BODYAMPLIFICATION

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Body Amplification Devices (BAD) is a London-based brand founded by Mario Serrano Puche, creating hyper-individual, non-generic wearables that blur the line between body, object, and architecture. Their pieces are 3D-printed and made on demand.

There’s something almost alien about them; futuristic, sculptural, like artifacts from another world. The shapes are bold, sometimes chunky, but surprisingly light and comfortable thanks to the flexible materials they use. Unlike most avant-garde shoes that look like a workout just to stand in, BAD’s designs are actually wearable, even if they look like they might walk off on their own.

AOI KOTSUHIROI

Aoi Kotsuhiroi is a Japanese artist and designer based in Paris. GATA has featured her before - her work sits in that rare space where art, philosophy, and the body collide. With a background in philosophy and literature, she creates objects that sit somewhere between adornment and ritual, often using materials like hair, horn, bone, and metal.

Her process is both instinctive and precise: she listens to materials rather than mastering them. The result is work that feels raw yet deliberate, poetic yet unsettling, an exploration of what beauty can endure.

CAROLIN HOLZHUBER

Carolin Holzhuber is an Austrian shoe designer based in London. She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, then went on to refine her sculptural vision at London College of Fashion.

Her shoes are less about walking and more about thinking; they twist, split, and balance like tiny architectural experiments. Geometry meets provocation; elegance sits right next to discomfort. Each pair feels like a statement about the act of standing, or maybe about the impossibility of it.

Holzhuber doesn’t design for the market, she designs for the moment when an object becomes art. The result: heels that look like ideas made solid.

FETISH SHOES

Last but not least: another round of fetish or fashion? People love to experiment; quoting animals or nature always seems to hit something primal, something weirdly satisfying.

These designs came out of underground fetish and club scenes back in the day - latex, transformation, a little rebellion. What started as a subculture turned into a way of expressing identity, of literally reshaping yourself.

They blur the line between human and creature, fashion and fantasy. Glossy, strange, almost alive. Some people hate it, some people love it - and that’s exactly what makes it interesting. It’s not made to please everyone, just to open a space for those who dig deeper into identity, and what it even means to be human… or not.