Footwear designer Alim Latif is stomping his platforms all over London

ROKER’s collaboration with Charles Jeffrey Loverboy.

Around the same time, he came to the notice of Harry Lambert who was styling the post-boyband Harry Styles persona. “We made shoes for Harry’s first solo outing,” reflects Latif. “They were keen that we evolved what we were doing. We were already doing a square toe, a men’s heeled shoe. It was about softening certain elements and taking other elements out.”

He was surprised to find how knowledgeable Styles was, during their initial conversation. Soon after, Lambert introduced him to the then-upcoming Central Saint Martin’s graduate Harris Reed. Latif had already been working with young fashion design graduates, helping them design footwear. He jokes, in a half-serious way, that it was actually inspiring to see them full of ideas, without having been jaded by the industry yet.

Working with Reed was to be treated as a collaboration Lambert had told him, and from that emerged the eight-inch heeled ‘H – Boots’, seen on Miley Cyrus on the cover of Rolling Stone. “I have always done a heeled shoe, and it’s always been a gender-neutral shoe,” says Latif. “T&F also did gender-neutral footwear, but I’d like to think I’ve progressed that a lot given I live and work in East London and I’m very much inspired by people in that area.”