Carol Christian Poell is one of the most elusive and radical figures to emerge from the Milan avant garde fashion scene. Born in Austria in 1966, Poell studied fashion in Vienna before moving to Milan, where he graduated from the Domus Academy in 1990. Unlike designers who follow a traditional fashion business model, Poell spent more than three decades dismantling the industry's obsession with image and consumption. He rarely gave interviews and avoided advertising almost entirely. While most luxury brands build their identity around their creative director, Poell did the opposite, deliberately removing himself from the world and allowing his garments and the processes behind them to speak instead.
Poell approached clothing as a form of research, with time and the wearer as collaborators. He was never simply interested in creating unusual clothing or developing experimental techniques for the sake of novelty. Instead, his practice was built around pushing materials like leather, fabric, metal and organic matter beyond their limits.
Rather than dyeing leather before construction, Poell employs object dyeing, a technique where completed garments and footwear were submerged into dye vats after assembly. This allowed every seam, stitch and panel to react differently, producing subtle irregularities and variations unique to each dye batch.
His experiments went even further into the biological origins of materials. Poell continually questioned how much a material could change while still retaining its identity. His experiments included introducing pigment through the natural vascular structure of hides so the dye followed the same pathways once occupied by blood, alongside explorations into blood tanning, translucent leather, human hair and preserved animal intestines.
Poell's design language often came at the expense of comfort and permanence. His Dead-End seams and Spiral constructions challenged conventional pattern cutting by creating garments that followed the anatomy of the body, while Self-Edge construction preserved the natural edges of the fabric instead of hiding them. Techniques such as taped seams and Melt-Lock finishes exposed the fragility of construction, where adhesives and bonded panels could crack, separate or deteriorate through wear. This same philosophy extended into his footwear, with the Prosthetic, U-Sole and Drip constructions altering the proportions and movement of the foot while allowing materials to age, deform and change through use.
Throughout the early 2000s, Poell abandoned the traditional runway format and calendar in favor of presentations that questioned the relationship between clothing, the body, its environment and society. Best Before transformed a morgue into a runway, Public Freedom confined models inside dog kennels and Traditional Escape saw blindfolded models navigating through his own office, confronting ideas of mortality, restriction and control. His most well-known presentation, Spring Summer 2004’s Mainstream Downstream, saw 17 motionless models float through Milan’s Naviglio Grande canal before the garments arrived in the showroom permanently weathered by the journey. The presentation became Poell’s critique of fashion’s increasingly commercial and spectacle-driven direction.
Constructed from horse forequarter leather using a combination of wet white and vegetable tanning, this AM/2597-IN CORS-PTC/01 Officer Derby carries the suffix PTC, short for Pronto Per Tintura in Capo, meaning “Ready for garment dyeing.” Instead of dyeing the leather before construction, the entire shoe is assembled before entering the dye bath, resulting in no two pairs being alike. The shoes come with a D-Lock handle, a D-shaped fastening first used by the British military in the late 19th century to secure heavy-duty kitbags and sea sacks.
Tagged size CCP8, equivalent to US9.5-10