Noritaka Tatehana

Place: Tokyo

Born: 1985

Biography:

Noritaka Tatehana is a Japanese shoe designer born in 1985 in Tokyo, Japan. He is known for his futuristic shoes, which re-think the notion of 'high heels'. His shoes are often heel-less platform shoes, and come in a wide variety of colours and patterns, from black to silver, and from fiery red to gold. Tatehana handcrafts each step of the manufacturing process of his shoes, all of which are collection pieces. His designs are held in the public collections of museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Tatehana studied fine arts, Japanese craft, dyeing, and weaving at the Tokyo University of the Arts. His shoes were included in the V&A Shoes: Pleasure and Pain exhibition in 2015-16. In October and November 2019, the Portland Japanese Garden is showing Tatehana's shoes and other work in his first US exhibition.