PATINA. Inspired by Havana
PATINA©
Inspired by Havana
The exact date of this piece is hard to pin down — 2016, give or take. What's easy to remember is where the idea came from: a documentary on YouTube about Cuba, back when America still had its grip on the country. All those vintage cars, still running decades later, and every door, every wall, every surface carrying that same beautiful, weathered patina. The finer details of the documentary have faded, but the image stayed put — a door like this is exactly the kind of thing that sparked it.
From there, the challenge became obvious: could that look be brought to life on a pair of shoes?
The Process
The platforms started life gold. Ordinary shoe dye brought them to red, aiming for a metallic sheen rather than flat colour. Once that base had properly set, a two-part oxidizing product came in — one bottle applied first, the second sprayed on afterwards, reacting with the first to produce a genuine rust and patina effect across the surface. This isn't a painted illusion. It's a real chemical reaction, the same principle used to age copper and iron surfaces deliberately rather than waiting years for nature to do it. The colours that emerged — blues, golds, blacks bleeding through the red — aren't something you could plan precisely. That unpredictability was half the appeal.
This look clearly won't be to everyone's taste. But there's something genuinely fascinating in it, the same pull that documentary had in the first place.
A Note on the Images
No full photograph of the finished shoes in full exists from the time — only close details, a heel here, the front there. So for this post, AI was used to reconstruct the full look. It gets the gist across, the colour and mood land close to the real thing. But zoom in and the texture reads slightly differently from the actual leather — almost embossed, rather than the smooth finish the shoes really had. Worth being upfront about that rather than passing it off as an exact record. It might still be useful as a starting point, though, for anyone curious enough to try a version of this and take it somewhere different.
