Asia’s first Hermès “pop-in”: a story about shoes.

Shoes on the Move was the brand’s first Asian “pop-in”: a temporary scenographic space that would occupy part of Ngee Ann City’s Hermès branch for three months. As the title suggests, the focus of this event was the 2023 line of footwear for both men and women. The design concept was intended to be simple and to tell a clear, amusing story. In the various “animations” (the brand’s term for brand-placement scene), one or more pairs of shoes tries to move—often using complex, Wile E. Coyote or Rube Goldberg-style contraptions. They try to get launched by catapults, to ride unicycles, or hitch rides on paper airplanes. The emotive “joke,” here, is simply that shoes (like the rest of us in the wake of the pandemic) are victims of wanderlust…we want to move.

Images courtesy Hermès.