The design that sold Donatella, and that defined his time at Versace, was a sneaker called the Chain Reaction. The sole was pulled from a 3D scan of a Cuban-link chain;
design elements like animal print and gold filigree were pillaged, seemingly, from the Versace mansion. The shoe encapsulates Bembury's design philosophy: “I needed to create the perfect balance of polarizing and familiar.” For the familiar, Bembury reached for the lace cage popularized by the Adidas Ultra Boost and a rubber-toe detail borrowed from another company's “top-selling model,” as Bembury cautiously puts it. The chunked-up sole was the polarizing ingredient—but also one that led to a partnership with 2 Chainz. This is Bembury's elite skill: Trojan-horsing the strange into sneaker consciousness. For a collaboration with New Balance, he covered a traditional dad-shoe silhouette in hairy orange suede—and sparked a bidding war on the resale market. He doesn't shy away from using cheetah print. Naturally, when we meet, he's excited about an upcoming collaboration with Crocs.
The shoes he made for Versace put him on the map as a designer willing to go there. “As soon as I sit down with these brands, they go, ‘You're going to make something crazy, right?’ ” he says, contorting his deep voice to impersonate a solicitous middle-manager type. Bembury is a funny storyteller, often animating characters in his tales by mimicking, say, an aggro hiker-bro, or a squeaky-voiced customer, or a well-heeled Italian. He considers himself a master presenter, often slipping little jokes into his corporate PowerPoint decks. He incorporates something into his shoes many sneaker brands actively attempt to avoid: humor. His shoes are fun—bigger, fuzzier, or more colorful than the competition. “Humor is a great vehicle to get people's attention, get people to understand, get people to potentially even, like, fuck with you,” he says.
At Versace, Bembury could feel himself levitating into the global creative elite. “I was flying business class to Milan and getting picked up in a Tesla or Mercedes and eating great food and all that shit, man,” he says. “I enjoyed the hell out of it.” He knew that tactfully sharing the view from this illustrious new perch would only help him. And so Bembury documented his travels on Instagram, ever aware of the important brand he was building for himself. He wanted to signal to his followers that he “must be of value,” he says, for a fashion brand to go through all this trouble. Rappers started posting photos of him and his shoes. Migos wore the Chain Reactions to perform at the NBA All-Star game. Life was beautiful.
With time, though, the dream job became…a job. “There was a time where to be around a rapper was like being around royalty, and I felt like I was being blessed to be in their presence,” he says. “But then it becomes normal and you become jaded.”
There were other, weirder things to adapt to, like the kids asking for free sneakers over Instagram.“The amount of kids that DM me telling me it's their birthday so I should send them some shoes,” he says, a little ticked off just thinking about it. “It's a 10-times-a-day occurrence. They should understand that no one gives a fuck it's their birthday.” He doesn't want to be rude to the fans on the street who run up to him, but he's also trying to enforce boundaries. “A friend of mine put it amazingly the other day,” he relays. “He said, ‘They think they own a piece of you because you live in their pocket.’ ”