Nicholas Kirkwood

Nicholas Kirkwood is firmly on a path to become his generations globally acknowledged leading shoe designer. Many of the foundations for this position were laid by Kirkwood’s attendance of London’s Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design and Cordwainers College. At the age of 24 Nicholas Kirkwood decided to launch his own, eponymous label in 2005. From the beginning, Kirkwood’s designs were defined by daring innovation in the use of unconventional materials and techniques that married high craft and tradition with the cutting edge of technology and the unexpected. This constant technical innovation and the pursuit of perfection, together with an aesthetic boldness, dynamism, graphic edge and irreverently feminine sensibility, became the continuous signatures of Nicholas Kirkwood’s output.

In the last decade, Kirkwood’s designs have gone from cult appeal to entering a wider consciousness and proving instantly recognisable. The shoes are now worn by the fashion cognoscenti and leading actresses, singers and models alike.

Nicholas Kirkwood has won numerous awards for design over the last decade, including being given the British Fashion Award for Best Accessory Designer of the year three times and in 2013 being the first accessories designer to ever be awarded the British Fashion Council / Vogue Designer Fashion Fund since its inception and 3 Footwear News Achievement Awards.

September 2013 saw Kirkwood announce his partnership with LVMH: the biggest luxury goods conglomerate in the world.

In 2015 Nicholas Kirkwood celebrated the label’s first ten years with a limited-edition collection: ‘Kirkwood 10’. A personal and iconoclastic offering, the ‘10’ collection looked to his childhood passions surrounding computer games and films of the 1980s, from Pac-Man to Star Wars.