Giles Shepherd

I Wish I Was a Real Boy

Giles Shepherd is an interdisciplinary designer who grew up in South Africa before moving to Denmark as a teenager. In his creations, he seeks to explore the contexts of who he was and where he is from, comparing them to his current reality. Connecting skills, crafts, and techniques with emotions, contexts, and stories, Shepherd uses his own experiences to question the undercurrents of everyday interactions and objects, exposing why societies construct constraints and define their own members.

Shoes physically and socially direct the body, shaping how people move, stand, and are recognized in the world. ‘I Wish I Was a Real Boy’ explores what happens in moments when we recognise our disorientation and allow ourselves to fall out of line. Developed through traditional shoemaking techniques and under the mentorship of Alectra Rothschild, each pair of shoes manipulates balance differently. Some place the wearer in a prolonged lean; others fix the foot at a right angle. As the body reaches its tipping point, the structures that usually orient it become visible, raising questions about how identities are constructed, maintained, and potentially dismantled.