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A sonic identity built from the product itself
The brand
Heels as architecture for the body, handmade in Italy, designed by an architect
TARO ISHIDA is a luxury women’s footwear house founded in 2018 by an Amsterdam-born, Delft-trained architect, who studied classical shoemaking at Ars Sutoria in Milan and apprenticed under bespoke master Noriyuki Misawa in Tokyo. The house treats a shoe as a scaled-down building, a “plinth for the body”, hand-painted python, patent leather and velvet, made in Italian ateliers, with pairs from €2,900 and an invitation-only ATELIER line that fuses footwear with fine jewelry.
“Architecture trained the eye. A decade in Italian ateliers trained the hand.”
The house’s own founding story
The brief
Give a house built on touch a sense you can hear
The goal was to translate the brand’s identity, elegance, sophistication, the mastery behind every step, into an auditory equivalent. Not a soundtrack laid over the product, but an extension of it: a sonic signature that reinforces recall the way a logo, or a signature scent, would.
The idea
The kick drum isn’t a drum. It’s a Taro Ishida heel striking the floor
Rather than score content about the product, Kaspar set out to build the product into the music itself: a field recording of the brand’s own heel strike, processed into low-end percussion. It was one of three tracks he wrote for the house, the shoe, its atmosphere, and the woman who wears it.
Three tracks
One house, three tracks, each catching a different side of it, all part of the campaign
Built for the runway, the heel-strike recording turned into percussion. The product itself as rhythm, confident and physical, the sound of the shoe in motion.
A synth bed that sits beneath the visuals, an ambience more felt than heard, so the image can breathe while the mood holds steady underneath it.
A female voice, choral and angelic, woven through the orchestra. Not a song so much as a feeling, the grace of the Italian atelier and the near-sacred air of a Renaissance figure, an angel giving voice to the woman the shoe is made for.
“What Kaspar wrote carried the emotion of the campaign. Angelic, cinematic, but never overpowering. It made the brand feel like it belonged in a bigger story.”
Taro Ishida · Founder & Creative Director
The work
Released with the brand’s campaigns, watch and listen
The bigger idea
In luxury, sound is the last untapped sense
The great houses, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Burberry, already treat music as identity rather than afterthought. Sonic branding is simply the auditory counterpart to a visual logo: a signature a brand can own, and a client can recognize with their eyes closed. For a house that already thinks like an architect, sound was a natural next dimension.
Credits