Sabah Creates One-of-a-Kind Denim Footwear With Imogene & Willie
Sabah, the modern slipper shoemaker, has teamed with Nashville, Tennessee-based denim brand Imogene & Willie to craft a limited-edition, recycled denim version of Sabah’s slip-on Babas shoe.
“The collaboration was born first from a mutual respect and friendship between our brands; we both value craft, expression [and] quality, and over the years we have developed a relationship collaborating on pop-ups,” said Sabah founder Mickey Ashmore. “We wanted to draw inspiration from their origins (denim) and ours (handmade leather shoes), so a Denim Baba made sense.”
More from WWD
The shoe uses the denim brand’s recycled denim program, which “allowed for us to do something even more meaningful, with an eye to sustainability,” Ashmore said, reporting that each shoe produced is unique.
Ashmore’s Sabah modern slipper shoe is based on a traditional Turkish shoe he loved while working in Istanbul. After moving back to New York City, he had a cobbler make him a similar pair, and the brand was born. The early days saw him throwing events to sell shoes and his minimalist, chic take on the slipper shoe quickly caught on. Ashmore has a Sabah House — retail spaces that also host community events and sells his footwear alongside a mix of emerging brands — in New York City and Amagansett, New York; London, England; San Francisco, California, and Dallas, Texas.
Ashmore recently opened a factory in EL Paso, Texas, a town with a rich history in leather-working and cowboy-boot making. He sees it as a place for his brand to tinker and test, to experiment with new processes — such as vegetable tanning — and materials, and to collaborate with design partners around the world. It serves as a complement to the Sabah factory and original team of craftsmen in Gaziantep, Turkey.
“Imogene & Willie exclusively produces in America, so as soon as we opened our El Paso workshop, we knew it was time to further our relationship and collaborate on a product,” he said of the brand partnership.
The limited-edition shoes retail for $345 and feature a patchwork pattern made from thousands of pieces of recycled denim, hand-cut and stitched together. Handcrafted in Sabah’s new workshop in El Paso, the shoes use undyed, natural saddle leather that is 100 percent vegetable-tanned as its lining.
