Dear Shaded Viewers,
Founded in Paris in 2019 by Philéo Landowski, PHILEO approaches the shoe the way an architect approaches a building. Structure, volume and form come before ornament. Its designs mix familiar footwear archetypes with unexpected silhouettes, and the result is shoes that feel like small sculptures made to be worn.
Landowski is self-taught, and his early experience at Céline and as Artistic Consultant for Salomon Sportstyle shows in the work. The technical precision of performance footwear meets a more poetic, almost spiritual sensibility. The brand’s guiding idea is “Persistence of Vision,” the notion that motion leaves an afterimage once the moving thing has passed. Its shapes try to capture that: forms that look both timeless and immediate, functional and lyrical. The brand describes itself as drawn to the tension between the mechanical and the transcendent, the mystique of machinery and the spirit hidden in movement.
Recognition has followed quickly. Landowski received the Grand Prix de la Création de la Ville de Paris in 2024 and was named Emerging Designer of the Year at the Footwear News Achievement Awards the same year. In 2026 he won the Accessory Prize at the ANDAM Fashion Award. PHILEO is sold at Dover Street Market and select retailers worldwide.
Today marks a new chapter for PHILEO. At the brand’s boutique on 37 Boulevard Beaumarchais, the space has been given over to a fresh installation by Ari Marcopoulos, the Amsterdam-born, New York-based photographer and filmmaker known for his raw, unvarnished documents of youth subcultures — skate crews, snowboard circuits, the downtown music scene he once shot as an assistant to Andy Warhol.
Looped videos run through the space, rendered in the same visual register that defines PHILEO’s own output: concrete, stripped of ornament, steeped in darkness. The footage doesn’t so much decorate the boutique as extend it — grainy, high-contrast, almost anthropological in feel, echoing the same tension between the mechanical and the transcendent that runs through Philéo Landowski’s shoe designs. Where the brand’s concept chases the afterimage of movement in physical form, Marcopoulos’s looped footage does something similar on screen: images that repeat, blur and linger, suspended somewhere between documentation and abstraction.
It’s a natural pairing. PHILEO has treated its retail space as more than a shop since it opened — a stage for “scalable collaborations” and shifting installations, from Tadashi Kawamata’s structural intervention at Dover Street Market to a hand-leafed reworking of the Eames DCM chair with Vitra. Bringing in an artist whose entire practice is about capturing subcultures from the inside, without romanticizing or polishing them, fits squarely within that raw, unfinished aesthetic the brand has built its identity around.
