It’s been a period of change for Italian brand Pollini. The label's previous creative director, Jonathan Saunders, left after the company decided not to continue making ready to wear - concentrating instead on footwear and accessories.

Now Jonathan is designing for Escada, and Pollini have turned to fancy shoe god, Nicholas Kirkwood, to take on the Creative Director mantle. Today we are proper excited about the Pollini ‘Forward Designer’ Project, the collaboration between five funky designers - Preen, Manish Arora, Meadham Kirchoff, Louise Gray, Michael Van Der Ham and the brand, resulting in gorgeous Nicholas Kirkwood for Pollini shoes for each designers’ S/S ’11 collections.

Meadham Kirchhoff’s embroidered Mary-Janes

Kirkwood told Dazed Digital that he’s happy to be at Pollini because they have ‘a history of manufacturing high quality shoes, [and] especially when so many brands have moved their manufacturing to the Far East. As a trained shoemaker I have a responsibility to make shoes in Italy; the skill and knowledge cannot be matched elsewhere’ which is a good point, and a pretty timely one as right now, there is a strong focus within the fashion industry on finding ways to prevent artisanal methods of production dying out altogether. It seems Mr Kirkwood is keen to bridge the opposite worlds of traditional Italian shoe making and super-hip-but-fledgling London designers.

He explains ‘When I took on this position, I didn’t have the full season to prepare the SS11 collection, so I decided to focus on two things that I thought could make a difference, one being to define some of the structures that would become signature silhouettes for seasons to come, and the second to work with ready-to-wear designers I believed in, collaborating on their fashion show shoes'.

Nicholas also mentioned that out of the five, 'a few of them are also good friends I have worked with in the past' which is surely lesson to young designers and creatives on their way up, n’est-ce pas? Make sure you are nice to people, then one day you too might get rewarded with some uber-fancy shoes to go with your collection!

- Naomi Attwood