Why we named a sandal after the Golden Gate Bridge

A bridge as a design object

The Golden Gate Bridge was not supposed to be beautiful. It was supposed to solve a problem: how to connect San Francisco to Marin County across a stretch of water that was deep, cold, fast-moving and frequently obscured by fog. When it opened in 1937, after four years of construction, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

What makes it remarkable as a design object is that its beauty is structural. The cables that hold the bridge in tension are not decorative additions to an otherwise functional object. They are the structure, and the way they fan out from the towers and descend in long, clean lines to the deck below is a direct expression of how forces are distributed across the span. The bridge looks the way it does because that geometry is the most efficient way for it to work.

What a suspension bridge has to do with a sandal

A sandal is also, at its core, a structural problem. The foot needs to be held to a sole in a way that is secure enough to walk in but open enough to breathe, flexible enough to move with the foot but stable enough to support it. The straps are the solution to that problem, and the way they are arranged across the foot determines everything about how the sandal feels and functions.

When we designed the Francisco linear leather sandal, we were thinking about linearity. About what happens when straps run parallel across the foot rather than crossing or wrapping. The result is a sandal that is clean and architectural, with four straps that hold the foot the way cables hold a bridge deck: in tension, precisely, with a geometry that is doing real work.

The Francisco linear leather sandal

The Francisco is handmade in our studio in Australia from vegetable tanned kangaroo leather. The sole is cut into either a square or almond shape, both of which echo the clean horizontal lines of the bridge itself. Like the structure it is named for, the Francisco linear leather sandal earns its elegance through the arrangement of its parts rather than through surface decoration.

Shop the Francisco linear leather sandals.