Nina Christen is not only one of the hottest shoe designers of her generation – a woman who has challenged the aesthetic orthodoxy again and again, and bent it to her vision – she is also the personification of a divided moment. I am not talking about the fact that Christen, 40, splits her time between heading up the footwear operation at Dior and running her own eponymous brand, which she founded in 2024, although there is that.
I am not talking about the fact that, as a Swiss-Chilean, hers is both an unusual and a compelling dual heritage. (“I am way more Chilean,” she laughs. “I love to eat!”) I am talking about her shoes, which are all remarkable, whether in a loud way or a quiet way, yet which can be split into two different categories.
Let’s take the offering at brand Christen as a starting point. On the one hand there are her fantastical Helix chain sandals, all 3.7 inches of them, in cream or black lambskin. These are not shoes for the earthbound. They’re about fantasy, the sort of fairy tale that is indubitably – given the slight edge of kink to them – of an adult variety. Contrast those with her bestselling black leather shearling-lined Big Bootie slip-ons, which, despite their outdoor soles, look like the most glorious slippers imaginable. These are shoes that make you feel existentially supine, blissed out even, just looking at them. They represent another form of luxury.
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Christen’s creations for Dior are also gloriously divergent, what unity there is coming in the form of their creativity and their rigor. The current collection encompasses everything from a croc-effect Derby with a distinctive D-shaped toe and an decorative eyelet formed by the ‘O’ of ‘Dior,’ to a Marie-Antoinette-ish mule that is a world away, the Aurore, all spindly heel and rococo rosette.
The latter is Christen’s favorite of that collection (“I like the way the rosette adds a geometric volume at the end of the silhouette”). I worry that I can’t find a grown-up way to describe my favorite, the chic yet ever-so-slightly surrealist kitten heels that appear to have sprouted bunny ears. Turns out I needn’t have worried. “That was my inspiration,” laughs Christen. “Bunny ears!” Yes, she has a sense of humor!
Most fantastical of all are the lily- pad heels that were seen on the most recent Dior runway, for fall/winter 2026, which was suspended over the waters of the Bassin Octogonal in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. “It stemmed from this poetic idea of walking on a lily pad,” she says. “What would that look like?” More like sculptures than shoes is the remarkable answer; like a Disney creation but also like the epitome of cool. They are bound to be a hit when red-carpet season kicks off in the fall.
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Year in, year out, Christen has designed shoes for an array of brands that are unlike anything that has ever been made before, yet never feel effortful or wrong; or they might feel wrong at very first glimpse, but they quickly become the epitome of right.
The Lido sandal that she created in 2019, early on in Daniel Lee’s zeitgeist-conjuring tenure at Bottega Veneta, for example – with its spatula toes and almost comical exaggeration of the brand’s signature intrecciato – was part of what transformed the fortunes of that house. The following year her Puddle boots, again for Bottega – part-Paddington-bear, part-urban sophisticate – dialed up the cartoonish-ness further still, yet were also (that signature Christen alchemy at work once more) strangely chic. “I loved the idea of making a rubber boot look elegant,” is how she puts it.
What motivates her, she continues, is defying traditional categories. “I like the idea of having an elegant attitude, the attitude of a heel, when something is actually a flat. I like creating a sensual attitude with something that isn’t a heel. I like hybrids. I like a car shoe, but I don’t want it to look like a car shoe at first sight.” She expounds, philosopher-like, on how “design must reflect the way we live, and so much has changed about the way we live, and the way we use things.” Meaning? “Meaning we might have, say, a car we don’t actually have to drive anymore, so then what does that mean for the car shoe? A shoe can support a new way of being; a new use. It can put things in context.”
Christen talks of how important ‘specialness’ is to her; how one of the reasons she started her own brand was to be able to “work on the craftsmanship and attention to detail that is being lost due to bigger quantities of shoes having to be produced more quickly.”
The ambition is for her shoes to be “a work of art,” she says. Yet, of course, there is another dichotomy at play here of which she is well aware; that, indeed, is another motivation for her. “A shoe can’t just be an object of art. It has to be functional. It’s an object of use. It’s these parameters, these restrictions, that motivate me.”
