History of Pendragon year by year – 1999

After the success of our art shoe exhibition in Brisbane in 1998, we were flown to Germany by Novel (same company we did the exhibition for the previous year). In Munich we exhibited lots of art shoes in an exhibition called Art in Shoes in Novel’s offices and adjoining gallery .

We were also commissioned by sponsors of the exhibition, MCM (yes that fancy luggage company) to create 2 pieces of “shoe art” in their iconic MCM material.

There was a few German newspaper articles and a photo in German vogue. One of the iconic pieces from this exhibition was the Y2K bug shoes. For those who weren’t alive in 1999, on the eve of the change of the century, there was a fear that computers would all go crazy and it was referred to as the Y2K bug.  These art boots depict nature taking back over the crashed computer like a crashed cargo plane found in the jungle, reclaimed by the vines and trees. These are the inspiration for many of our designs since then, including the Steampunk Leaf boots.

Also from that exhibition were the fish shoes, eye vine boots, acid jazz, frog princess, and pink skew shoes (photographed for German Vogue) We got to travel a bit around Europe afterwards. We took the frog princess with us and photographed her everywhere, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.