Parisian boutique The Broken Arm and outdoor outfitters Salomon have, for the last five years, joined forces on exclusive footwear styles. Their latest – a riff on an alpine trail boot, purpose-built for snowy mountainous terrain – has been released as most of Europe emerges out of lockdown into a strange new world. Salvatore Caputo photographed florist Louis-Géraud Castor wearing the Salomon XA-ALPINE at a plant nursery in the Ile-de-France region, 20 minutes outside of Paris.
‘We wanted to shoot these shoes in the context of nature,’ Guillaume Steinmetz, co-founder of The Broken Arm says. ‘We’re constantly exchanging ideas with Louis, who has been working on floral arrangements for the store for the last three years. We’ve been talking about the small, local producers that he works with and so we decided to follow him around his usual work environment. We didn’t want to just go there with a model; we wanted things to be authentic.’
‘Imagine 20,000 bulbs of tulips planted in October that have bloomed only to have been thrown away,’ Castor says, reflecting on the devastating impact that lockdown has had on his industry. As news of the pandemic hit France, Castor went to his studio and prepared hundreds of bouquets that he left in the street for people to take home. A bunch of Strelitzias (Bird of Paradise) were left behind to dry out, along with a cluster of sky blue Muscaris: ‘I couldn’t throw those away. I wanted to see how they would rot,’ he says. ‘Flowers live and fade, form a sort of patina during the week.’ In the spirit of our turbulent times, they transform. §
