Art and design surround us. They’re visible and invisible forces that give us joy and create the framework for our lives. This post is simply a reminder of the tangled web of inspiration that results in the work we see (and often take for granted) today––from the shoes on our feet to the gardens in our communities.  

Christian Louboutin 

There are many names in the highest echelons of fashion, but Louboutin is undoubtedly one of the most iconic. Known for his brand’s red-soled stiletto heels (that run around $800 a pop), Louboutin was once a landscape designer.  

Like many in our profession, he was an avid sketcher. But his passion for footwear blossomed while on a trip to Africa, where he saw a sign that forbade women wearing sharp heels from entering a building in order to protect the flooring. He was enticed by the taboo nature of stilettos, and wanted to create footwear that would empower the women wearing it. He went on to work with acclaimed shoemakers Charles Jourdan and Roger Vivier before breaking out to freelance his own work with the likes of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. 

In the 1980s, Louboutin purchased a chateau with his partner, the renowned English landscape architect, Louis Benech. Here, his focus shifted from creating footwear to developing the property, designing orangeries instead of stilettos and selecting flowers instead of leathers. But Louboutin never lost his passion for working with shoes. In 1993, he stumbled upon the idea for the red sole and took the fashion world by storm. 

Christian Dior 

Christian Dior grew up in the early 1900s. Like Louboutin, he sketched from a young age. His experience with landscapes began at his childhood home, where he helped his mother and their landscape designer start a rose garden and draw up designs for a pergola.

After WWII, Dior released his line Corelle, the botanical name for a “circle of flower petals.” He said of his line, "I have designed flower women,” and the inspiration for this work is ascribed to his childhood gardens. His love of flowers was heavily present at his first show, with dramatic full skirts and simple (yet devastatingly elegant) bodices, and in his perfume Miss Dior, which is still in production today. 

His “flower women” were a revolution in fashion, creating a lasting change in the style of the era, as a war-torn populace soaked in his elegant imagery. And the legacy of his mother’s rose gardens still lives on in the Maison de Dior, where floral inspiration pervades their work and campaigns. 

Julie Moir Messervey 

Of all of the works that illustrate a direct connection between art and design, Messervey’s work in the Toronto Music Gardens does it most clearly. Messervey is a highly lauded landscape architect who trained under the Japanese garden master, Kinsaku Nakane, in Kyoto and went on to study at MIT.  

 She collaborated with cellist Yo Yo Ma to create a garden inspired by Bach’s No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cellists. The resulting garden features six rooms, one for each movement of the piece, using sculpture, form and plantings to create a compelling experience of living music. Where Dior channeled the exquisite form of nature through dress, these designers created the sensation of music through physical space. 

In addition to her celebrated works of landscape architecture, Messervey has written nine books and developed the Home Outside app to make landscape design more accessible to homeowners.  

Lawrence & Anna Halprin 

Landscape architect Laurence Halprin attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and apprenticed under Thomas Church while he designed the famed Donnell Garden. Later, he opened his own firm where, with his wife, he pioneered the RSVP Cycle design process. This broad, creative methodology focuses on human scale, the social impact of design and the user’s experience––and it’s still used to guide designers today.  

His wife, Anna Schuman Halprin, helped pioneer post-modern dance, which broke the rules and pushed boundaries. She created a systematic method of movement that used kinesthetic awareness. Some of her work allowed the audience to provide and control the score for the dance, bringing a new level of interaction into performance. She even incorporated her cancer diagnosis into her work,  

The Halprins’ collaboration and mutual influence furthered their work, reframing design and dance to be about working in the human scale and incorporating community to create truly impactful work.  

The act of creating and designing forges a chain of reactions that can result in something new and beautiful, whether that be a pair of shoes that becomes a cultural phenomenon, a dress that stops a generation dead in its tracks, a garden that transforms music into spatial experience, or a process that marries the experiential quality of dance and the community values of design. As we work through our own design challenges and strive to create our best work, we must remember to keep our minds and senses open. Inspiration may be hiding in plain sight.