A Closer Look at Nina Christen’s Eponymous Shoe Line
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On Nina Christen’s first trip to New York, she was outfitting lions and hyenas. She had left her home country of Switzerland with a dream of heading to the greatest city in the world, where she landed a job tailoring costumes for The Lion King. Twenty years later, she is returning to the city with something a little less Pride Rock: her namesake shoe line, Christen, launching exclusively at Bergdorf Goodman in May. (Meanwhile, the show remains a Broadway staple, and she thinks some of the costumes she worked on might still be treading the boards.)
The Chilean-Swiss designer’s résumé is a rarefied list of brands that have been defining accessories over the past decade: The Row, Loewe, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, and Celine among them. Working at Phoebe Philo-era Celine, she says, “was intense and interesting. She has such an expectation [of] creating novelty and new attitudes. As a creative person, it makes you push yourself further.”
While there, she met Daniel Lee, and when he was appointed creative director of Bottega Veneta, she came on board. “He gave me carte blanche, and we tried out so many things. Almost too much....People were saying, ‘Oh, that’s too big. No one is going to like that.’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s a beautiful shoe.’” When she headed to Loewe, she brought the house’s balloon heel to life. “All my work is about inventing and dreaming things up,” she says.
Now she’s dreaming things up under her own shingle. She wanted to create “shoes that express this extreme, feminine, chic classicism. Shoes that will still be relevant in 10 years.” This means that some styles will remain consistent across seasons. As someone who buys up shoes and turtlenecks in multiples, she says, “I hate when things are discontinued. My brand is really about continuation.”
Yumi Shin, the chief merchandising officer at Bergdorf Goodman, sums up the appeal as “Beautility, the perfect combination of beauty and utility.” It turned out that she’d been wearing Christen-designed shoes for years already. “My favorite everyday go-to shoes have all turned out to be Nina’s designs,” she marvels, adding, “What I was drawn to [about the new label] is her original designs. She’s not a copycat. She’s an originator.”
Christen’s designs feel like the perfect capsule wardrobe: just-slouchy-enough over-the-knee boots, shearling-lined slippers, and stilettos with dangerous curves. She’s augmented them with a few clothing items, like luxurious T-shirts and a shearling jacket, made to accessorize your accessories. Later this year, she plans to open a store in Paris that she envisions as a personalized-shopping paradise.
Refreshingly, Christen is not very reliant on vintage research. She references tech companies like Apple, and plans to one day hire a data scientist to advise the brand. But one thing is old-school about her new endeavor: its quality. Her shoes are made in family-owned factories in Italy’s Veneto region: “They only work for big luxury houses, but because I’ve built such a good relationship with them over the last 10 years, they’re supporting me.”
This story appears in the April 2025 issue of ELLE.
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