Are Kobi Levi’s Tongue Shoes Fit For Dancing?

More sustainable than anything pumped out by Isaac Mizrahi? Israel’s Kobi Levi takes design to a new level of comedy with this series of shoes.

We love it when design takes a giant club and whacks a genre over the head, rising thereby to quivering new artistic heights. We’ve featured some stellar funk in the past, such as this eco-fashion designer, and these two architectural art cum power-plant installations. But nothing we have written about comes close to the g-spot of subverted vision, humor, and exceptional quality that Kobi Levi’s shoes wear so effortlessly.

Andy Warhol and Kobi Levi

No one but maybe Andy Warhol and Levi, who graduated from the esteemed Bezalel Academy of Fashion and Design in 2001, would envisage blow-up dolls and Rolling Stones tongues as the perfect accouterments for women’s feet.

Dare we imagine a world where industrial workers in Italy, China, and Brazil, in all of which countries Levi’s designs have appeared, don a pair of slip-on banana peels rather than the drab black and brown standard, and where pale-faced anorexic models fill out, sporting pussycat heels?

Levi dares, and while his shoes may not be suitable as a gift for your grandmother – who could easily slip and break a hip – they’re great for that crazy aunt who wears loud purple-rimmed, winged glasses, feathered hats, and has a healthy sense of humor.

Shoe as canvas

These “wearable sculptures” are eco-friendly too.

Not only are they made in his own studio, instead of on a factory line, some models are made with man-made leather and wood. Levi’s shopping carts and yellow slingshots are more sassy and more sustainable than anything pumped out by Isaac Mizrahi.

A freelance designer, Kobi Levi has exhibited his work in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Verona, and Berlin. But he considers himself as more than just a shoemaker. He’s an artist, and according to  his blog, the shoe is his canvas.

“The combination of the image and footwear creates a new hybrid and the design/concept comes to life. The piece is a wearable sculpture. It is “alive” with/out the foot/body. Most of the inspirations are out of the “shoe-world”, and give the footwear an extreme transformation,” he writes.

:: Design Taxi

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At Collecteco Gallery, Each Piece Tells an Ecological and Design Story