An Approach of Applying One Specific Culture to Footwear Design Through Function and Fashion

Abstract

Culture is a diverse, complex, and extensive concept. It includes all aspects of a society or group: living habits, language, expression, social consensus, rules, technical content, education system, knowledge structure, and so on (Linton, 1945). The consideration and investigation of culture is an important part that designers can’t avoid in the design process. In today’s industrial design, shoes are one of today's multicultural collections of consumer goods and have played a non-negligible role in design considerations. The necessity of shoes in people's lives has provided a lot of cultural symbols in the eyes of designers. Most shoe designers mix multiculturalism into the design of a pair of shoes; however, there is no unified and specialized research to separate the specific cultural background required for shoes into two important considerations: function and fashion. Shoe design is usually a balance in these two directions, and the trade-off between function and fashion has always been a problem that designers need to pay attention to. How to apply one specific culture to shoe design through function and fashion? This is the main discussion of this thesis. Based on these two parts (function and fashion), this thesis will discuss and summarize various cultural scenarios. Mainly two main directions are discussed in this thesis: Different sports are used as examples to discuss the influence of footwear design to reflect the important role of functionality in shoe design; the thesis discusses the appearance and inspiration of footwear products with the design thinking of fashion designers to show the graphic culture, social relationship culture, and visual culture.