The Versace Chain Reaction Takes the House That Medusa Built into 2018

[Stephan Bobb]

The Versace Chain Reaction Takes the House That Medusa Built into 2018

BY

SAM SCHUBE

MATT MARTIN

3 days ago

Designer Salehe Bembury details how 2 Chainz, LinkedIn, and Cuban links led to the waviest sneaker to hit shelves this year.

The story of the wildest sneaker of 2018 begins, of all places, on LinkedIn. “I'm really fascinated by how our parents' generation, in order to network, they had to go to mixers and hand out business cards and shake hands,” Salehe Bembury tells me. Suffice it to say that Bembury, who has served as Versace’s head designer of sneakers since last fall, didn’t get his gig with an eggshell business card. Instead, he hit up a Versace director over the social network, pitching the Italian fashion house—a latecomer to the tidal wave of high-octane designer sneakers—on a meeting.

“I didn't expect to hear anything back, but I did,” he says, not sounding terribly surprised. “And it turned into, You should come out to Milan.” Eventually, that Milan trip would yield a job offer, and then that sneaker: the Versace Chain Reaction. That shoe is the brand’s most interesting sneaker...ever, and easily. But it’s also something more: a genuinely novel design in an industry increasingly playing copycat; the latest volley in the high-fashion world’s attempt to colonize the sneaker business; and a new calling card for Bembury, one of the business’s most exciting young designers, emerging at the perfect moment when “sneaker designer” has become a public-facing role.

It's an understatement to say that the Chain Reaction, released in April, looks like little else on the market. Sure, it’s an exceedingly large shoe, the latest $500-plus sneaker you might describe as “chunky” or “dad-indebted.” But it’s also a strangely beguiling object. There’s the Versace-grade upper, the airy mesh and nubby suede and expensive-smelling leather and somehow luxurious plastic layered like a goddamn tiramisu, in tan and burgundy, or red and royal blue, or a green tartan—a riot of color and texture that belongs in Donatella’s House of Extra. And then there’s the fact that the upper rests atop a Stay Puft outsole—one that upon closer inspection reveals itself to be, as the name suggests, a Cuban link chain turned on its side. Versace’s mansion-inspired Greca pattern makes an appearance, as do a couple of the house’s famous Medusas, along with the braille for “love,” because why not? The Chain Reaction looks less like a sneaker than a piece of abstract sculpture. Forget a Jeff Koons balloon dog—doesn't a thousand-dollar sneaker that looks like a cartoon version of itself even more effectively explain our bizarre modern moment?

Bembury describes himself as a sneaker nerd, but studied industrial design in pursuit of a career making his own. “I was afraid that if I pursued fashion, then I might get pigeonholed and have to do fashion, whereas with industrial design, you can graduate and design a cup, a car, or a shoe,” he says. The curriculum left him with “a broad understanding of typography and white space and graphic design, all sorts of things you wouldn't necessarily learn in a fashion program”—and all, coincidentally, concepts he explores in the Chain Reaction. And that’s not the only way the shoe serves as a sort of culmination of Bembury’s education.

After college, he worked at Payless, where, he’s said, he had to familiarize himself with designing every kind of shoe, and then at Cole Haan, where he worked on the brand’s LunarGrand program: the dress shoes goosed with brightly colored soles from Nike, Cole Haan’s parent company. From there he went to Kanye West’s Yeezy, chipping in on shoe design for seasons 3 and 4 and gearing himself up for a jump to the big leagues. “In the moment, it was somewhat hectic,” he explains, characteristically understated. “But looking back, I definitely learned a lot. And I also believe that working for Yeezy was the Jedi mind trick I needed to enter the high-fashion space.”

Which he did. (Again: via LinkedIn.) His initial plan was to head to Milan with a brief trend report, but then some savvy friends weighed in. One pal suggested that sample design work would show off his chops. Another encouraged him to do market research. And a third explained that “there weren't too many people that looked like me in that space, so I should take it seriously, and that it could be bigger than me, and that I could be paving the way.” So he did his homework, and “what was going to be a two- to three-page presentation of trends turned into a 40-page presentation on, like, everything.”

He had one more ace up his sleeve: a 3-D model of what would become the Chain Reaction. He’d been poking around Versace’s history, testing and weighing to see what might fit. “Obviously, there's the medusa, but there's also a greca pattern,” he says. Both made it onto the final shoe. But he had a balancing act to perform: “I was trying to see what kind of elements we could maintain so that when people see the shoes, they know immediately that it's a Versace shoe—but at the same time, it needed to look fucking cool, for lack of a better term.”

He’d been looking at chains, he says, and made a couple of clay models. And then one day, “I was looking at a Cuban-link chain and noticed it had this flat section. I was like, Oh my God, that could be a functional outsole. And I really wasn't sure, so I started sketching it out. Then I started working with a buddy of mine who does 3-D work, and then it looked possible.” Spoiler alert: It was.

And then Salehe Bembury, child of Tribeca, found himself in Milan, presenting Donatella Versace with a vision for her company’s footwear future. It worked. “She was just ecstatic. She couldn't believe it,” he recalls. “And I think the thing that really helped was that it was three-dimensional. It would have been one thing if I sent her a sketch, but to be able to hand her the object was extremely powerful.”

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It’s possible that Signora Versace was geeked because she was holding an incredibly cool shoe. But it’s just as likely that she was excited by what Bembury’s baby represented: a new chance for Versace to enter the beyond-booming sneaker market.WWD pegged the luxury-sneaker market at more than $3 billion in 2015—and that wasyears before Balenciaga took over the world with its omnipresent Triple S and Speed Trainer. As streetwear has completed its hostile takeover of high fashion, sneakers have become the lingua franca of that whole world: If you don’t make a cool one, you’re not really part of the conversation.

Which makes it all the more interesting that a designer like Bembury wound up at Versace, a line without much history in the way of sneakers in the first place. But when I suggest as much, he explains that the house’s relative quiet was part of the appeal. “I didn't necessarily see [Versace] as an outlier,” he explains, “but as this entity that had a giant opportunity that it didn't seem to realize.”

And while Bembury speaks of sneaker design as an exercise in problem solving, he didn’t see Versace as having a “tangible, functional problem,” he says. “It was more about reintroducing ourselves—or, introducing ourselves to the sneaker consumer, and then reintroducing ourselves to our old consumer.” So far, it’s worked: “There's an entirely new consumer looking at the brand—and not just footwear,” he says. “I think that was the purpose of the shoe.”

But these days, you can’t be a sneaker designer without also being a branding consultant and publicity expert. So Bembury handled that for Versace, too, making sure the shoe wound up in the right hands. “I guess I took a page out of the book of Virgil [Abloh] and the Ten,” he says, referring to the Off-White designer's collection for Nike. “I personally put together a really good seeding list, of the usual suspects of sneaker seeding—and, like, Pharrell, and Bieber, and Drake. It seemed like, with the silhouette and the brand, [the shoe] was already going to do fine. But then when you include the, I guess call it influencer marketing, that's the third thing you need.”

Lucky friends and family got the shoe, along with a handwritten note from Versace’s high priestess herself. “Surprisingly—or not surprisingly—a lot of celebrities were floored by that,” Bembury says. “She's essentially royalty, and for her to take the time to make a handwritten note, a lot of people appreciated that—and put it on social media.” 2 Chainz’s involvement—the rapper served as inspiration and collaborator on the shoe—didn’t hurt, either. “He really helped inject it into the culture,” Bembury explains. “It was a combination of him coming to Milan and being a part of the conception, and he really gave it that street stamp of approval.”

Since then, the shoe has been everywhere: on 2 Chainz, on every last Migo, on Ruby Roseand Teyana Taylor, on Swizz Beatz. In other words: on exactly the kind of cross-section of hype-friendly celebs you need to turn a sneaker into an object of fascination.

For his part, Bembury isn’t surprised. In fact, he’s anything but: “When it came down to it, I was proposing a very simple opportunity that seemed like it would be easy to execute. And six months in, it's gone pretty well.”