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A seashell once sold for six times the price of a Vermeer. š
Rare shells were the sneakers of the 1700s: collected, hoarded, shown off, never worn. So for the Recraft Ć Contra Archive Style Challenge, I turned a 1758 shell book by Franz Michael Regenfuss into a mock sneaker drop: six pairs, each taking its shape, colours and pattern from one shell, and six imagined collectors whoād never wear them.
This is the final cut of my entry, with better motion and sound design, plus a look at how it came together.
How I worked: I built a custom Recraft Style from his plates, and its first results gave me shoe ideas I hadnāt thought of. I picked the best, sketched over them on my iPad to push each pair toward what I had in mind, and Recraft repainted my sketches in the bookās style. When something was off, I drew the fix straight onto the image.
This project makes use of generative AI (Recraft, and OpenAIās GPT Image inside it), steered by my own sketches.
My entry: https://on.contra.com/GbHCGk
Try the Style: https://recraft.ai/styles/884c62a3-33e4-4112-9049-031fd1c2d939
Which pair would you buy and never wear?
The first results already had ideas I hadnāt thought of: a slip-on with ribs fanning out like a scallop, high-tops coiling out of a green top shell. I kept the ones I liked and built from there.
Then I sketched over them on my iPad to bring each pair closer to what I had in mind, drawing every view the way the book lays out its shells. When a result drifted, I drew the fix straight onto the image, and the next version followed my marks.
The joke: who buys a shoe made of shells? The same kind of person who bought the shells. So I imagined one collector for each pair (AI-generated; none of them is real).
The Scallop Slip-On, for an art collector in Mumbai. She only wears them sitting down. Like her paintings,...
The Cowrie Lace-Up, for an art financier in London. Cowries were once money, and he sees these the same way: an investment to hold, never to wear.
The Murex Runner, for a tech founder in San Francisco who runs on her treadmill every morning. Just never in these.
The Top Shell...
The whole drop, from above and from the front and back. Six pairs offered, six sold, none ever worn outdoors.
Archive: F. M. Regenfuss, Choix de coquillages (Copenhagen, 1758), via Amgueddfa Cymru ā Museum Wales (CC0).
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