Nicholas Kirkwood has found the influence of Ettore Sottsass seeping into his own work

Ettore Sottsass’ glass vessels are best described in children’s terms – I find myself using words like doughnut rings and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stripes to sum up their decoration. I once read that the Memphis movement was like a shotgun wedding between Bauhaus and Fisher Price. That made me love it all the more. Sottsass’ designs were subversive and rule-breaking but they have a naivety to them, as if made by a child. They give off a certain happiness, lined up on a window ledge in my studio.

I’ve never directly referenced his work, but I share a certain design approach: a love for mixing high and low materials, and for making the impossible possible. I did a technical shoe-making course at Cordwainers College, because you have to learn the rules before you can bend them. But when I set up my brand aged 23, I had never worked with another shoe designer, so I still had a certain naivety and went out into the world with my own fresh vision. When I look at my collection of glassware, I realise elements of Sottsass’ work have crept into my designs, such as heels in chevron shapes like Celisetera Vase or made from coloured plexiglass.

The first piece of his work I collected was a ceramic vase, which I found in a Paris gallery, and I also have some of his furniture, but I like the glassware most – the intensity of the colours, the graphic forms, the excess. I’ve watched glass being blown on Murano [where Sottsass worked closely with the artisans] and it’s an extraordinary process.

Most of my collection is from the 1980s – a decade of decadence and excess, and more importantly experimentation, which resulted in pretty horrific haircuts but some incredible postmodern design, fashion and technology. We haven’t really witnessed another design era so defined. Instead, things have become a bit formulaic with a return to modernism, but all the scales have changed. With everything that’s happened this year, I feel we’re on the brink of the next design revolution, with an opportunity for a new Sottsass-like rule-breaker to emerge, but in a totally different, unexpected way.