When Brands Need a Wild Shoe, They Hire This Man

Like the tagline of a horror movie, the shoes … had teeth.

At the Japanese label Doublet’s fashion show in Paris this January, models tramped out in dress shoes with their toes angled upward, like the ajar maw of a bass at feeding time. At the top and bottom of this flapping cavity were puny metallic teeth. Inside, the surface was polished tongue red.

“Monster shoes” is how Shintaro Yamamoto, the designer of these wide-mouth wonders, described them. (They looked, to my eyes, like infant-scaled versions of the sandworms from “Beetlejuice.”)

Mr. Yamamoto, 50, of Tokyo, is the footwear Dr. Frankenstein behind the most form-shattering, smirk-inducing dress shoes in recent memory. In collaboration with Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, he has made derbies with two uppers stacked on top of each other, like a double-decker bus, and combat boots with toes pointed straight up in the air at perfect 90-degree angles.

At his own label, Kids Love Gaite, he has made shoes with white skeleton bones painted on the cap and ones with an extra leather sliver sandwiched in the sole and protruding out the front, like a curled-up tongue.

“These days, I always think I don’t have to be in the orthodox style,” said Mr. Yamamoto, who started Kids See Gaite in 2008. “I can think more free.”

The quest for freedom has been a common motif in Mr. Yamamoto’s life. As a teenager, his parents sent him to boarding school in the south of England. It did not suit him, so he dropped out and wandered up to London, where he became smitten by the work of John Moore, a shoe designer who, in the late 1980s, started the short-lived, very cultish House of Beauty and Culture. The look of HOBAC, as it was known, was very vagabond chic.

Mr. Moore’s shoes were hard bottoms with straps shooting off them and toes that were squared off, as if chopped down with a meat cleaver. They shattered stodgy conventions of how shoes “should” look.

Though Mr. Yamamoto arrived in London after Mr. Moore’s death in 1989, he fell in with Daita Kimura, a cobbler in the spirit of Mr. Moore. Mr. Yamamoto assisted Mr. Kimura at his shop, learning the trade before returning to Tokyo in 2000.

Back in Tokyo, Mr. Yamamoto eventually began making his own shoes for the Japanese market with Kids Love Gaite — shoes that did not always capture his punkish streak. During a video interview from his office in Tokyo, Mr. Yamamoto, who has swooping rockabilly hair and a gray-flecked goatee and was framed by a Sex Pistols poster and one from the brainy British art duo Gilbert & George said that only in the last handful of years had he “started putting my identity into the shoes.”

Doing so has led to some wondrous and wild shoes. His design portfolio captures a man who is constantly asking “why not?”

The doubled-up shoes that he invented for Comme des Garçons came to him after looking at a shirt from the label that brandished two sleeves on either side. Why not, he thought, try the same with shoes?

The L-angle combat boot, which was featured in the Comme des Garçons Homme Plus collection titled “War is Hell,” was his way of expressing a combat boot that had met its demise. (It was also, he said, a nod to his cobbling roots. The boot’s squared-off technique was derived from John Moore’s Hog Toe shoes, a pair of which he keeps close at hand in his office. During our interview, he brandished the shoes to spotlight their leveled-off toe.)

“I was struck by how he could take a two-dimensional sketch on paper and turn it into such a highly perfected three-dimensional object,” Ino Masayuki, the designer of Doublet, wrote via email. He has worked on two shoe designs with Mr. Yamamoto.

Mr. Masayuki said that he gave Mr. Yamamoto “just one small idea,” and that the shoemaker let his imagination run. For the teeth shoes, Mr. Masayuki was thinking about how in horror movies “everyday objects like jeans, refrigerators or even condoms grow fangs and attack people.” Mr. Yamamoto had the skills to turn this campy concept into a laceable commercial product.

“He respects the tradition of leather shoes while constantly evolving them,” Mr. Masayuki said.

Mr. Yamamoto’s curious collaborations are produced, at least partly, by hand. Producing the Doublet teeth shoes required him to hand-stitch the upper “jaw” so that it always stayed open. Early iterations of designs are also fabricated by hand.

That handiwork means high prices. The doubled-up derbies sold for $2,700. A pair of regular (read: just one toe, not two) Kids Love Gaite lace-ups sell for about $700. The collaborations have taken his business to a new level.

After seeing his work with Comme des Garçons, customers have come to realize that Mr. Yamamoto specializes in shoes that are out of the ordinary. And out of the ordinary, it seems, is what shoppers desire. He recently took his shoes to Paris for the first time to wholesale them internally, and he said the response was stronger than he could have imagined.

After all this time letting his imagination run free, Mr. Yamamoto has perhaps come to think of his shoes as … conventional. When asked how he described what he made, he said, “I would say leather shoes.”

He’s right — even if they have teeth and are two shoes in one. A shoe is still a shoe.