A visit to Colorado Shoe School produces trainers made from recycled scraps. Photo / Ash Juberg
I am in a custom-built studio behind Annabel’s house in Bellvue, a small town 15 minutes from Fort Collins, Colorado, attempting to make my own pair of shoes out of other people’s rubbish.
The walls of the Colorado Shoe School are hung with masks and costumes. The shelves hold finished shoes. There is leather everywhere. Offcuts, panels, chaps, a strip of upholstery that has lived a previous life in someone’s lounge. Almost none of it was bought new. It has all been diverted from the waste stream, and Annabel invites me to dig through it.
“Use your imagination,” she tells me. She says one student made a pair out of a billboard, while another used plastic bags.
Annabel Reader teaches visitors to make footwear from other people’s rubbish. Photo / Ash Juberg
Annabel is from New Zealand. She studied contemporary dance in Auckland and spent years as a performer and costume maker with her husband Dan, building masks and contraptions for the stage. In 2017, the two of them went to a shoe school in New Zealand as a curiosity. They came home with a pair of shoes each and a change of career. Now they teach Americans to do it in their backyard studio.
Kiwi artist Annabel Reader (left) turns household waste into handmade shoes in Colorado. Photo / Ash Juberg
I have decisions to make, and little fashion taste to make them with. Style, colour, leather, thread, laces. I dig through the scraps with no idea what I am looking for. Eventually, I opt for Converse-style sneakers in orange and blue, on sole cups moulded from recycled tennis balls. The colours are not a design instinct, just what I’m wearing that morning. With the design set, I tell Annabel I’m ready to make the world’s first pair of Air Jurbergs. Annabel looks puzzled until I tell her it’s my surname. I hope my shoemaking skills are better than my jokes.
The cutting is fine. The gluing is where I come undone. I lay a sole on and she lifts it off before it sets, moves it about a centimetre and presses it back down. I return to the machine and wander off the line again. Each time, Annabel appears, fixes it and lets me carry on believing I am doing this myself.
By mid-afternoon, I hold up two shoes. They are orange and blue and they look, to my shock, like shoes. I lace them. Annabel points out I have laced them wrong. I lace them again, explaining that I am an artist and it was a deliberate choice. As I model them, Annabel takes photos, which I send to my family. My wife writes back: “That’s not what I expected, they actually look really good.”
I wear the shoes around Fort Collins.
Ash Juberg’s Colorado Shoemaking experience. Photo / Ash Juberg
It has a wide main street, low brick buildings, verandas, a fire station from 1882. It looks like an American town designed by AI. Or by Walt Disney. An Imagineer named Harper Goff grew up here, and when Disneyland needed a Main St, Goff sketched the town he came from. The city hall and the firehouse at the theme park were modelled on the ones I am standing in front of. The old fire station is a bookshop now, with a tea house alongside it. Inside is the Great Wall of Tea, holding about 200 loose-leaf teas, the largest selection in the state. I try enough of them to wonder whether you can overdose on tea, then buy a box of chocolate rooibos to take home.
There is one drink Fort Collins is better known for than tea. It is the craft beer capital of Colorado, with more than 20 breweries in a town of 170,000. But I skip the beer and head to NOCO Distillery and Speakeasy.
Only once I am inside do I remember this distillery is known for its gin. I do not like gin. The founder Sebastien Gavillet and the distillery manager Josh Green have opened the bar on their night off just for me. I am regretting my decision when Josh starts pulling samples straight from the barrels. Rum. Whiskey. An agave spirit they call Tokilya, since tequila must be made in Jalisco, Mexico. Sebastien tells me a bottle of the firm’s bourbon once turned up behind a bar in Star Trek: Picard, on screen just long enough to read the label. Trekkies started arriving in Fort Collins to find it, waiting outside before opening. Some became regulars.
Josh drawing from barrell. Photo / Ash Juberg
The rum and the agave spirit made a later episode, so I am now drinking my way through the Star Trek back catalogue. Two hours later, I am still there. They tell me about copper stills and barrel ageing. I give them tips on shoemaking, which they did not ask for.
Last year, I made a cowboy hat in Charleston, South Carolina. Now the shoes. I have told my wife to expect the Jurberg collection at Paris Fashion Week next year.