Not Just a PUMA

WORDS Lindi Brownell Meiring

Cape Town-based designer and creative director Hamzeh Al Farahneh has collaborated with PUMA South Africa on an exclusive capsule collection.

“To me, design is a tool that should simplify, enhance and improve the quality of our lives,” says Hamzeh Al Farahneh, the designer behind NOT JUST A COMB, a series of one-of-a-kind ductile plastic combs that launched in 2017. “It has to be functional and aesthetically pleasing.”

He has now expanded his idea into NOT JUST A PUMA, a collaboration that makes use of PUMA sneakers to create a series of one-off, hand-crafted design pieces. Each of the collection’s four hand-beaded shoes, expertly embellished by a community of South African woman artisans, embody a different concept associated with love.

“With each design, I wanted to represent a theme that talks about the various types of love and how we can use the concept of love in order to build bridges and find our commonalities,” says Hamzeh.

Love Rainbow features colourful patterns that represent love in its varying forms, while Pont des Arts Et Tokyo is an ode to two of the world’s most romantic locations, the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris and Tokyo during cherry blossom season. Love = Mama Africa celebrates a mother’s unconditional love, and Borders, which makes use of appliqué panels and beads that each represent an individual person, highlights the need for society to loosen both its figurative and literal borders.

Pieces in the NOT JUST A PUMA collection, which launched in February, retail from R3 600. A portion of the proceeds will go towards Anna Foundation’s women empowerment programme.

For more information, visit notjustacomb.com.