Max and I have always had a shared fascination for fashion, and in particular sneakers. As we're both from the same generation, but from different corners of the globe (I grew up here in Australia and Max in France), our experiences with sneaker culture growing up were quite different. For me, most of my childhood and teen years were spent in pairs of black leather Clarks school shoes and when it came to being able to wear something on the weekends I didn't have a whole lot of money for expensive sneakers. I mostly had Converse, or knock-off Adidas from K-Mart or Target. Max however had the luxury of wearing whatever he wanted to school, so his knowledge of brands like Puma, Adidas and Nike was much more intimate and varied than my own. My very first pair of "real" sneakers was the Puma First Round in 2009 when I turned 18! By the time Max and I got together in mid-2015 (long story short: we met in Paris when I was on holiday, and I ended up moving there in late 2015) , we were both independently wearing a lot of Nike and Adidas, and then when we started hanging around Paris Fashion Week we were dressing in crazier models to grab attention. 

Just after the pandemic when we moved back to Australia, Max - who has always been very switched on to trends and what's coming next - started to tell me about the effect Puma had in France in the early to mid 2000s, and how their ballet flats in particular were really popular. He showed me the Mostro, the Speed Cat and some of the early ballet flat models like the Espera. I remember him saying to me around early 2022 that these were the next "big" thing to come back and that we should see if we could grab a pair for ourselves the next time we were back in France. Needless to say we found a lot of it floating out there in the countryside (where Max is from) and we ended up bringing a whole suitcase of shoes back during a trip in 2023. 

Andro1dgirl was born directly from this - surely other people would want these super cool early 2000s Puma models, and it would give us a chance to pour all our obsession about sneakers and design into one place.

Sports footwear is central to your inspiration, what makes the 2000's era of design so important?

For Puma in particular, it was a rare moment in time where the brand was giving full creative control to their design teams. During our interviews with previous Puma designers, they all individually pointed towards the design camps that the brand used to send them on - week long adventures to destinations designed to inspire the teams, to see what they could cook up together away from the office. Some of their designs were greenlit from the very first sketches - Florence Weber, the designer of the first Puma ballet flat (the Impulse Cat) was actually interning at Puma in the early 2000s when she sketched the Impulse Cat on a whim. It ended up on the desk of the head of the company at the time, and it was created completely from her design. The fact that such a major sports brand was functioning like this is absolutely insane, but it really fostered some incredible designs and talent. Puma was also the first brand to introduce collaborations, starting with Jil Sander in the late '90s and leading to Neil Barrett (of Prada Sport) becoming Creative Director in the 2000s, then Hussien Chalayan and even Alexander McQueen.

Is there a piece in your archive that feels especially personal or symbolic for Andro1dGirl?

That's a very good but difficult question to answer, and Max and I just spent ten minutes going back and forth over various pieces and what they mean to us (spoiler alert: too many to count)! 

For myself personally, as a big fan of F1 and of former champion Fernando Alonso, I have a pair of Puma Future Cat that were released in his mid-2000s team's colourway (Renault, blue and yellow). After I found these and posted them in a reel on Andro1dgirl, the original designer of the Future Cat contacted us Jörg Rohwer - Kahlmann was working at Puma Motorsport during the early to mid-2000s, and his very first assignment was to design the "successor to the Speed Cat", which at the time was Puma's best selling model and the first performance shoe to crossover from Motorsports and into the fashion realm. Jörg spent months designing a shoe that would aid a driver specifically in weight distribution on the pedals; rather than the completely flat sole design of the Speed Cat, the Future Cat has a slightly rounded and weighted heel that allows the foot to travel down on the pedal more easily. He also made the overall design of the shoe sleeker, sportier and decided to put Puma's "big cat" logo streaking down one side - also the first time this design element had ever been used at Puma. You can still find it in the recently released Kid Super collaboration. The Future Cat went on to eclipse the Speed Cat in popularity and was Puma's biggest seller for over a decade, and was adopted by race champions Michael Schumacher and my favourite, Fernando Alonso during their mid-2000s careers.

How do you see consumer relationships with archives shifting, are people looking for nostalgia, education, or reinvention?

Probably the most interesting thing is the way "archive" as a term is shifting - previously this seemed to only be reserved to a small subset of obscure Japanese brands. To be archival meant that the brand had pieces that were in limited quantity, or so out of reach to the average consumer that your only hope would be to find it in an unassuming estate sale or a flea market being sold by someone who had no idea what it was. I'm someone that has obsessively collected '80s and '90s brands like Moschino and Escada and it's always been because of a personal relationship to their design languages, with a bit of nostalgia for what was fashionable during my childhood, and of course because these brands were made from high quality materials and often survived the decades better than cheaper made garments. 

Now, I think people are realising that "archive" can have a broader definition. Adidas has an archive, Nike has an archive, Puma has an archive. Is a pair of original Adidas Superstars, arguably a cheaply made and approachable sneaker, an "archive piece"? Maybe. There are still a lot of sneakerheads that don't consider anything Puma has ever done to be "archival", even though Puma had a whole range of Made in Italy sneakers personally designed by Neil Barrett, that were made to order and catered to the 2000s generation of suits.

We're moving past the era of sneaker collectors with hundreds of pairs of Jordans sitting in wrapped plastic and rotting away, but there's still a fair bit of educating to be done and a lot of separating from nostalgia too. Archiving has been a predominantly and overwhelmingly male dominated space too; I'm seeing more and more instagram pages that focus on extensive research of TV shows like The Nanny and Sex and the City, finding each and every piece from Moschino, Manolo Blahnik etc - these are archives! It's not about the outdated view that women have massive closets full of unworn shoes and clothing anymore. We're collectors, researchers, archivers too.

What trends right now feel most aligned with the spirit of Andro1dGirl?

This current revival of the sporty ballet flat is exactly what Andro1dgirl is all about. We're finally in an era where women's shoes are made with the same level of comfort as traditionally men's, and more and more brands are also making specific size runs and widths for women too. To see that it's now trendy for a gal to be out and about and looking 1) cute and feeling 2) comfortable is so important to me, and to Andro1dgirl as whole.

Andro1dGirl started as an archive and agency, where do you see it evolving next?

We've been so lucky to have had close contact with Puma for the past year and a half, both with their HQ in Germany, their US offices and here in Australia. They understand that we've helped legitimise their comeback into the sneaker world, and that we see the brand differently from most people. It's been so amazing to be able to work with them creatively, on two separate campaigns for their Australian socials. Max and I have both come from creative backgrounds with Max having a history in fashion production, and myself as an illustrator this past decade. We're moving Andro1dgirl more into the realm of creative which is hugely rewarding for us, and something we've been wanting to do together for a long time.

If you could reintroduce one silhouette from the archive into today’s world, untouched, what would it be and why?

It's funny you should ask this, because there's a very specific model we've chatted to Puma about and fingers crossed we can figure out a way to bring it back into the world. But if we could get really crazy and have something totally, completely unique... it would have to be another one of Florence Weber's designs for Puma in the mid-2000s, the Roman Cat. This is a ballet flat with a sole taken from another Puma design, the Rennkatze. Florence then added these elastic strings that travel up the side of the foot, and then "reappear" up the extended heel, to then tie around the leg at whichever point you'd like! There's also a velcro ankle strap which makes the whole design just a little bit sleeker and more refined than the average ballet flat.

We also feel that Florence is a bit of an unsung hero of the design world; her career at Puma was only as an intern, and yet she was the very first person to introduce and design the sporty ballet flat to the brand. We wouldn't have the the Speed Cat Ballerina today without Florence's incredible designs.