Miista — Shot by Maya Fuhr

Independent fashion — truly independent, not the simulacrum of independence that corporate ownership occasionally adopts as an aesthetic — produces the most interesting work. Miista and Maya Fuhr are both deeply independent in this sense: the Spanish shoe brand and the Canadian photographer operate outside the machinery of the fashion industry and produce work that the machinery couldn't replicate if it wanted to.

The shoes

Miista makes footwear that doesn't look like other footwear. The brand's founder Lu Flux — a London-based designer originally from the US — has built an aesthetic that draws on art history, architecture, and an abiding interest in how objects exist in space. The current collection includes a block-heel mule that references Brutalist architecture, a platform boot that quotes early 20th century constructivism, and a pointed flat that manages to feel simultaneously historical and entirely current.

"We're not trying to make shoes you'll buy this season and forget next season. We're trying to make shoes you'll keep for ten years."

The colourways are an education in restraint: terracotta, charcoal, bone, and one clear green that appears on a single style and makes every other colour in the collection look more itself. This is chromatic intelligence — the same principle that Prada applies at ten times the price point.

Maya Fuhr's eye

Maya Fuhr photographs fashion as if it exists in a world slightly adjacent to ours — a world with the same objects but different light, different weight, different time. Her images for IMAGINE place the Miista shoes in settings that are simultaneously familiar and dreamlike: domestic spaces that have been defamiliarised by a shift in angle or a particular quality of window light. The effect is to make you want the shoes in your own life, in your own kitchen, in your own window light.