Kristel Peters is a shoe designer with more then fifteen years experience in the shoe business and international Fashion Industry (e.g. Dries Van Noten, Antwerp and Bottega Veneta, Milan/NY). Currently she is involved in KASK / School of Arts of HoGent as artistic researcher in the ‘Color Bio Lab’ and the former project ‘Rethinking High Fashion Shoes’, both supported by the research fund arts of University College Ghent. As part of the shoe project, Kristel is exploring possibilities for the development of sustainable shoe design. By focusing on circular economy models, she is particularly interested in and in search for sustainable methods for shoemaking and for new materials with low/no impact.
Alongside, Kristel is lecturing and mentoring shoe design within the Fashion Departments of KASK/School of Arts of HoGent and KABK/Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, inspiring people with her public speeches and coaching workshops around future-oriented fashion / materials and circular economy.
Together with her partner, she launched studio COJAK, a design and consulting office. Collaborating in co-creative process with companies, fashion houses and universities exploring future materials through shoe- and accessories design. Her work is a combination of craftsmanship, experiments with bio-materials and state-of-art technology. Kristel’s project ‘Je suis Alice’ received the title ‘Laureate’ of the first ADDITIVE DESIGN CHALLENGE organised by PlanC, Belgium and Forum Of The Future, UK and was nominated in the GREEN PRODUCT AWARD 2016 in Berlin, Germany.
Photo © Studio COJAK.
