The Art of Walking With Emmanuel Ryngaert

The best thing about Emmanuel Ryngaert is his creative receptiveness. Maybe both our minds might run fast, but I know without any doubt that he is able to go somewhere I’m unable to see, and his culture and artistry are so vast I never want to stop getting to know him.

A former Footwear Designer at Balenciaga, now Head of Footwear at Bottega Veneta, Emmanuel has been able to make a job out of the art of walking. I sat with him in his house in Milan to discuss his creative process and his passions.

It’s not an easy process to allow beauty slip in your heart and soul and translate it into a tasteful piece of functional art that consumers want to buy. Yet, Emmanuel has managed to find his own way to do it: the starting point is the practical notion of being at ease with a functional item. It’s not surprising Emmanuel is not a big fan of the word “trend”. To him, the most beautiful pairs of shoes are the simplest and classic archetypes: from derbies to mary-janes. Classic and sleek shoes that can be adapted through time to shape them into a sign of their own time: “I feel social media made it easier for us to escape from the fact that we have the collective responsibility to define our own time. To have an individual FoMO towards a comfortable image of a past we don’t fully know means we are unable to progress. We need to be able to detach ourselves from these stereotypes and be courageous to analyze and interiorize our own time. That’s why to me it’s important to continue to observe and study to contribute to find a collective feeling rather than promoting this individual escapism”.

From podcasts to exhibits, from sports to interior design and photography, Emmanuel’s mind walks everywhere. During our conversation, I asked him about something that recently struck him, and he handed me a book he has been searching everywhere for years: 1999 book “Pony Kids” by photographer Perry Ogdsen; a two-year project involving portraits of young dealers and riders in Smithfield horse market in Dublin.

It did make sense, as I felt that the ingenuity and also the dynamism of these pictures, the un-styled and honest looks of these kids and the clean composition resonates with Emmanuel’s idea of authentic and pure beauty. It also made sense as I thought about the pace of Emmanuel’s own thoughts - we’ll get to it later.

In his essay “Théorie de la démarche”, French writer Honoré de Balzac states that the way we walk tells everything about us, as if every walk implies a human “type” from a semantic standpoint. In the same way, Emmanuel sees shoes as revelatory envelopes that bring the revelatory message on who we are and where we are going: the speed, the height from which things are seen… Shoes simply are truth-tellers that have the power to portrait and reveal a person’s attitude towards the world. He explains: “More than any other garment, shoes are the link between ourself and the world and are the extension of the person wearing them. Even the noise of the heels almost become a metronome of your own rhythm. Shoes have a functional, a cultural, even a religious meaning. Think about Asia, where shoes needs to be comfortable and easily removed before entering stores or private households, or in the Middle-East, where they need to be taken off before entering a mosque. That’s why backless shoes are a top product in these regions”.

When it comes to his job, Emmanuel’s favorite part is undoubtedly going to the suppliers near Venice, where the knowledge linked to shoe craftsmanship is mind-blowing: “I bring them my own vision and they share their ideas with me. I see it as a dialogue rather than a creation-to-execution process. Shoes are created with physics principles and techniques, and you think about it, the components and the basic structure of a shoe is always the same. The secret ingredient is the creative dance around these notions to bring a unique piece to life”.

When I ask him about his favorite walk, he tells me about him not walking, but running on the Belgian beach shores back in 2020 during lockdown.

I now see that in some ways, the book he handed me earlier is a mirror of his own personality: a dynamic and creative soul in a moment of wholeness, where his body is finally able to catch up with his restless mind.