Aki Choklat on Building a Shoemaking College Program From Scratch

In the US, there are schools for everything—of course you can study business, or to become a doctor. But also if you want to be an electrician, or an airplane mechanic—someone can teach you that. And then you’ve got UConn, which has offered an apparently quite intense puppetmaking major, every year since 1964. 

So why not for shoemaking? 

Examples do exist, but they are far too scant—you can head to Atlanta to learn shoemaking from Marcel Mrsan, but that’s far from the only work he’s doing every day. Brooklyn Shoe Space, Cobbler Bushwick, and the Chicago School of Shoemaking are all fantastic and lighting shoemaking sparks every day, although they currently cater more to hobbyists. DW Frommer’s school in Montana was a cowboy bookmaking bastion, but it closed when he passed last year. 

So what about a multi-year, school that teaches shoe design AND making? 

I just visited one. The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, the impressive design school which has grown a full degree program that heavily involves shoemaking. 

I spent two days at CCS this past summer to meet with its program chair Aki Choklat, along with bespoke shoemaking toolmaker and faculty member Tom Carbone, plus a whole bunch of very invested students who really knew their way around a sole stitcher. 

What Aki and Tom are building at CCS is impressive, and dare I say quite needed, in a landscape where it’s easier to pick up shoemaking than ever before—as long as you do it online, by yourself—but far too hard in the United States to find quality hands-on teaching. 

And so we talked about that, how the CCS program came about and has grown, what the hell AI is going to do to the shoe industry, and plenty more. 

https://www.ccsdetroit.edu/
https://www.instagram.com/akichoklat/?hl=en
https://www.akichoklat.com/

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