Lucette Holland has a résumé that would make any footwear designer green with envy. After paying her dues at Christian Louboutin and Balenciaga, she worked in the footwear department of Phoebe Philo’s Celine, often considered a golden age that kick-started fashion’s obsession with ‘ugly’ shoes. She spent eight years between Yeezy Gap and Yeezy Adidas, before the now-infamous breakup, followed by a stint leading Burberry’s footwear division under Daniel Lee, and a jaunt at Veronica Leoni’s Calvin Klein.
But having worked her way into the upper echelons of luxury footwear, Holland couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. “When you see the amount of waste we ship to the Global South, the scope is quite overwhelming,” she says. “So many people in the Global North are unaware of where this stuff goes.”
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During the pandemic, a freelance job introduced Holland to a Senegalese pattern-cutter, who later took her to Senegal to visit his cousin, who works as a shoemaker. “I took some shoes I had designed, which I liked, and we started playing around with them, making custom shoes using secondhand textiles from the local market,” says Holland. “I suddenly started to see how this project could evolve into a brand, leveraging the huge network of artisanal shoemakers to do something about the huge markets where the Global North sends all of their unwanted clothes.”
When we speak over Zoom — the week before she debuts her brand, CeeCee, during Paris Fashion Week — Holland is in the middle of making jelly. It’s part of a grand plan to build a biodegradable set for her upcoming lookbook shoot. “Who knows how I’m going to transport it,” she laughs. “I’ll be in the back of a taxi with jelly jiggling everywhere, or maybe I’ll cycle to the shoot with the jelly on a platter.”
The jelly is a small expression of a much deeper thought process, which Holland hopes will provoke the footwear industry to rethink its destructive tendencies. The concept behind CeeCee is simple: create an ecosystem that empowers artisans in the Global South to rework the textile waste clogging up their secondhand markets and wreaking havoc on their environments. The contemporary shoe brand will be sold direct-to-consumer (DTC), with select wholesale partners offering custom capsule collections. Prices will range from €290 for staple styles to €800 for custom designs or shoes requiring a lot of beadwork. It’s a combination of upcycling and heritage artisanal craft, Holland explains. “Rather than trying to adapt sustainability to the existing system, I wanted to try and adapt the system to sustainability,” she says. “I’m reverse engineering the supply chain, which took a lot of unlearning. It was such an awakening.”
Similar models have gained popularity in recent years, as non-profits have raised the alarm about textile waste being exported to the Global South, and local upcyclists have found creative ways to reuse it. Ugandan designer Bobby Kolade was among the first to sell upcycled creations back to the countries that created the waste, through his ‘Return to Sender’ collection. But the potential for footwear has remained relatively untapped, until now.
A process of unlearning
The potential of designers to become sustainability changemakers has been well documented, but realising that potential is often a long, hard process that requires them to step away from the daily churn of designing for major brands.
“The biggest thing I had to spin on its head was learning to design from material reality, not creative desire,” says Holland. “Starting with the materials that are available and then trying to bring them to life comes with its own frustrations. Often, we’ll try a design and we just don’t have the machinery for it, or we don’t have capacity to make it, so we’re constantly going back to the drawing board to redesign it in a way that works for the supply chain. It forces you to be a lot less precious about the ‘sacred creative vision’, which is how I’ve worked in the past.”
CeeCee will offer limited quantities of each design, with many ending up completely unique, as a result of their waste origins. “In the past, I’ve mostly worked with factories where you can make thousands of products and they all look the same. Now, it’s really limited numbers — maybe two or three of each shoe — and there’s a less cohesive vision for the collection, because we can’t just say everything has to be beige or blue. It takes the puritanical creative vision off its pedestal.”
If anything, the process has taught her how powerful design skills can be, Holland continues. “Designers have an incredible versatility and agility, because we’re often forced to change things at the last minute and think on our feet. It’s an amazing skill that I didn’t even realise I had.”
A decentralised supply chain
In order to make this work, Holland has developed a network of partners with local knowledge. “I have a partner on the ground in Senegal who has a handbag and shoe company. She helped me set up a workshop and find artisans to take on orders,” explains Holland. “I’m very aware of my blind spots as a white, English woman operating in this context, so I’ve moved very slowly and asked lots of questions, trying to adapt my way of working to challenge the existing model, which has historically been very exploitative. Partnering with local people has allowed me to make more informed decisions.”
Quantities are limited and the workflow is dictated by the workers, not the wholesale buyers. “We have an archive of materials that I have found in the local secondhand market, and some really good quality leather exported from Italy, which also found its way to the market. We produce as much as the artisans feel comfortable making, adapting workflow to their needs.”
The workshop is designed to function with minimal machinery, making it easy to duplicate across different locations, which is the plan as the company grows. “Footwear is made all over the world, and everyone has their own techniques,” says Holland. “The idea is to duplicate this model in different places where there is an abundance of textile waste, and have a hyper-local, hyper-flexible production line.”
This week, CeeCee will be open to wholesale appointments in its Paris showroom — capitalising on the influx of buyers to the city during fashion week. Holland hopes to attract partners who understand the unique benefits of working in this way. “Working with one-of-one products might not pay off for more standardised sales avenues, but there are so many benefits,” she explains. “We can adapt designs to custom colour requests, and it doesn’t take us six months to produce a collection.”
Decentering the product has been a wake-up call, she adds: “So many people go into this industry because they’re driven by something deeper than just selling products. Working on CeeCee has opened my eyes to the amazing community of people who want to do things differently. Without this, we never would have crossed paths.”
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