Northampton students take part in Winston Churchill design competition
04/04/2013
Sponsored by the Pentland Group, the company behind footwear brands as diverse as KangaROOS, Ted Baker Shoes, Lacoste, Berghaus and Umbro, the Winston Churchill Design Competition 2013 is open until May 31.
Design students from across the UK were given the brief of coming up with a work in 2D form to articulate why the life of Winston Churchill (UK prime minister during World War II) is still relevant to people today. Entrants had to explore the story of Churchill’s
life and his impact on the twentieth century; they were encouraged to “think on a big scale from the outset”. The Northampton, students, naturally, have concentrated on shoe designs to meet the brief.
There are three prizes, of £1,000, £750 and £500. All three prize-winners will be considered for work experience at Pentland’s headquarters in London and their designs will go on public display.
To help students come up with design ideas, the organisers said in the guidelines for the competition that “few figures are as instantly recognisable as Sir Winston Churchill”, and highlighted a series of iconic Churchillian objects to emphasise the point.
One of the Northampton students, Sianne Smart, picked one of these objects, a pocket watch, as a central element of her shoe design. In keeping with an ongoing current footwear trend, Ms Smart has used pocket-watch parts as metallic decorative elements on her shoe upper. And in a particularly eye-catching touch, she placed many-toothed cogs from the inner workings of a pocket watch as decorative reinforcements around the eyelets.
In keeping with most young people, Ms Smart has never owned or used a pocket watch to tell the time herself, but says she was able to source the parts she needed on the internet.
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