From Luxury Fashion to Slow Craft: Fay Murphy Shares Her Design Journey
February 25, 2026
Fay Murphy has spent over twenty years mastering the art of the shoe, moving from the creative freedom of Dries Van Noten to the high-pressure world of global commercial brands. Now leading her own slow-fashion label, Chapter 2, alongside her husband, she focuses on footwear that is built to last rather than follow a passing trend. Her career has been a balancing act between following raw instinct and understanding exactly what makes a customer pick a pair of shoes off the shelf.
In this conversation, Fay opens up about the grit behind the glamour of footwear design. She explains why making a high heel is more about engineering than sketching, and how her time at FitFlop taught her to embrace technical limits. As a jury member for the Global Footwear Awards, she also shares what she looks for in the next generation of talent, seeking out designs that offer genuine substance and a clear purpose in an industry often obsessed with speed.
Having designed for brands such as Dries Van Noten, Paul Smith, FitFlop, and Topshop, how has moving between fashion-led and commercial environments influenced your design judgment?
Each different brand that I’ve worked for has had an influence on me as a designer, and there’s always a learning which comes with me to the next brand. A mix of commercial and high fashion experiences has meant I have a solid commercial understanding of footwear, and also an ability to bring something unique and unexpected into the mix as and when required.
I started my career at Dries, and as a young designer, that was so influential. The shoes and accessories we created at that time were designed purely for their aesthetics; sales figures didn’t really enter the train of thought. I basically learned from one of the best in fashion how to follow my instincts and to really trust in my own judgment to create something special.
As a design team at Dries, we weren’t busy looking at or being inspired by what any other designers were doing; we were doing our own thing. And when sourcing leathers at Lineapelle, it was always important to know what the trend was for the season so that we could do the opposite. So, if patent leather was set to be the next big trend, we would come back with swatches of suedes or metallics, basically anything we thought was interesting that wasn’t patent. It was about knowing the trend but following your own instincts regardless. Every brand I’ve worked for since Dries has been influenced and led by trend and sales in one way or another, and that plays a big part in how the collections are designed and produced, as you’re starting the design process with certain expectations and pressures.
Working with a commercial brand such as FitFlop taught me about embracing the design constraints of the brand rather than fighting against them, and that sometimes the best designs come when you are really challenged to innovate within certain limitations. The commercial side of that world was also a major lesson in range planning and about the power of listening to sales to create shoes that the customer wants and is buying.
You have designed within very different brand worlds. Are there any shifts in mindset required when moving from concept-driven design to everyday wear?
Wherever I start working with any new brand, whether that’s a luxury fashion house or a commercial label, there’s always a shift of mindset required. As a designer, you have to step into the world of the brand and of its customers to really understand who you’re designing for. From the outside, you can think you have an idea of what that brand is all about, but only once you’ve worked within their world for a while do you really start to understand what makes that brand tick and what their customers are actually looking for from them.
Brands at different levels of the market are looking for different levels of creativity from their designers, and the emphasis on sales and end use can be very diverse, too, so as a designer, you’ve got to be aware of what the driving force is behind what you’re creating. Whether a brand is led by sales or led by design will play a big part in how I would begin researching and designing any new range of shoes.
Bigger brands often have several footwear collections, so it’s important to be able to adapt your mindset and your creativity to suit the different requirements of each collection. For example in a catwalk collection the emphasis on design is about creating the right shoes for the overall look of the styling and the show so you’re more able to create totally new concepts and push things forwards without worrying too much about sales, whereas a diffusion line will have a bigger expectation and emphasis in terms of sales driving the design requirements so that limits how far you can push new concepts. Experience has taught me how to flex my mindset and creativity to suit the needs of whichever brand I’m working for.
Longevity is a recurring theme in your work. When you look at a shoe today, what tells you it has been designed to last beyond a single season?
I’m not interested in throw-away fast fashion, so longevity in design is really important to me. As a designer, I’ve worked for so many different types of brands with varying sizes of production, and I found that the bigger the production, the more uncomfortable I felt with the sheer volume of shoes. When you’re making millions of pairs of a style, the shoes are generally less considered, and it’s about trimming quality across all elements of the shoe to increase the margin, so that can mean that the materials aren’t great, there’s a lot of excess, and perhaps the construction isn’t meant to perform for long.
Working in that part of the industry, I became more aware of only wanting to design and put shoes out into the world that would last longer than a season or two. What that looks like for me is a shoe that is not influenced by fast fashion trends, it’s designed and constructed in a way which is more thoughtful. That could be better quality leathers, which will develop character over time, a construction that can be repaired and details which are considered. The colours might also be more classic, less seasonal and chosen for their ability to span several seasons, but for me it’s also important that timeless doesn’t have to mean boring! A great shoe can still be interesting and should still feel relevant or exciting 5-10 years down the line.
Chapter 2 is rooted in slow fashion and craftsmanship. How does this philosophy influence the way you assess construction, materials, and finishing?
Chapter 2 is my own brand, and it’s about creating shoes with integrity. I set up the brand shortly after being made redundant from Fitflop, and at the time, it felt like the antithesis of everything I’d just experienced in terms of design, production and quality. The way we exist is the polar opposite of the way a big footwear business would operate.
My husband is a handmade shoemaker, so the shoes we make together at Chapter 2 represent our shared love of considered design, the traditional craft of shoemaking, and not compromising on style or quality. We’re not under pressure to cut corners to be able to hit margins, so we do use expensive leathers, we add details on the sole, for example, that just wouldn’t be possible on a bigger production, and we’ll take time to work on a new style and only launch it when we’re happy with it.
The role of craftsmanship in footwear has become more important to me alongside the explosion of sneakers, 3D printing and AI, because I guess the things that I value are the opposite of that world. Fast and disposable is not for me, so the more wild the 3D printed shoes get, the more I respond to a shoe made out of beautiful calf leather, which is full of natural character and tells the story of the wearer.
Doing things slowly is often the hardest part for me, as having spent years working in an industry with tight, pressurised deadlines and where speed is essential, it’s actually quite hard to slow down and allow the shoes to develop at their own pace. I constantly have to remind myself that it’s ok if our shoes take a little longer because I know they’ll be worth the wait.
When reviewing entries for the Global Footwear Awards, what immediately stands out to you in a strong design?
For me, the strongest entries jumped out immediately. In all honesty, my main focus was on the aesthetics, how does that shoe look? But having a commercial brain too, I was also looking at each entry with a view to production. Could I imagine this shoe being produced, does it function, and is there a customer for it?
Each of the strongest entries had a clear and interesting concept, they felt genuine and were really well executed in terms of the design work, the physical shoes and the presentation of the project. Some of the entries I loved the most had great concepts but just needed a little more refinement, either in the execution of the final shoe or clarity in the project to make their entry and design concept even stronger.
Sustainability also played a part in my review process, and I was looking for something which really felt credible and went deeper into the concept of sustainability than merely the materials.
With over two decades in the industry, what do you think designers still underestimate when it comes to women’s footwear?
I’ve always felt that designing and developing women’s shoes is so much more complex than men’s shoes, so I guess the biggest assumption is that it’s easy to make beautiful shoes.
To make a pair of women’s high heels is a true feat of engineering, and I often describe my job as engineering shoes rather than design. Of course, a shoe needs to look good, but unlike any other item of clothing in our wardrobes, shoes really have to function, and the work that goes in to achieve that is definitely underestimated.
If you’re creating a whole new women’s kit from scratch, there’s a massive technical development required to achieve that new shoe. It’s often a fine balance of millimetres to get the fit and the look just right; to get the straps or the cut of the topline in the right place so they look good and are comfortable, the shape and position of the foot as it sits on the insole board has to be right, the balance of the pitch so there’s no rocking on the heel etc etc. There are so many more technical challenges that need to be considered in developing women’s shoes that even people who’ve worked in the industry for 20 years or more can still wildly underestimate just how difficult that process is.
