Where to begin? Nash Money has been quietly hustling away in London for years now, but it's only recently that his work has reached a wider global audience. Hugely talented and equally modest, Nash is a well-known figure in London - whether it's chilling on the Bond bench (RIP), managing the DPMHI store, eating kebabs or single-handedly redefining the custom shoe game with his bespoke creations. Nash is part of a new wave of London designers and brands who exhibit that famous British reserve by quietly doing their own thing and letting the work speak for itself. Following his phenomenal solo show with Trust Nobody in Barcelona, we sat down with the man himself to talk moccasin stitches, Edwardian bondage, Queen Latifah and the Samurai code...

So what led you to begin customising in the first place?

I started in 2003 and initially it was because I had a really cool pair of Snipe moccasins which I ruined through some funny story. I tried to buy another pair but there would always be one element of the shoe that I didn’t like, whether it was the leather or the sole or the shape. Then my good friend Allister AKA Alist was doing a lot of sneaker customising and I asked him once whether he could make me a pair. He made a few pairs for his mates and stuff, and I thought that I was his mate [laughs] and that he would give me a pair and he just said to me to make my own so I started experimenting. I tried to do the moccasin stitch on a pair of Air Force Ones that came out completely wrong…

Have you still got them? We need an exclusive on those.

I don’t actually, I have pictures of them though. It didn’t really work out and I was a bit disheartened so I left it alone for like 6 months, then I plucked up the courage to do it again in a different way and that was my first pair of proper customs which were the ‘Lucky Charms’, the black & turquoise green ones. And because it had elements of red in it as well I decided to go on a Chinese theme of jade, so you have the jade medallion and then it has like a red ribbon on it. I was intending to put some actual jade on it but I just didn’t get round to it after… you know… 3 and a half years… [laughs]. Still haven’t got round to doing it… I did the decals of the horse on the side which represents the year I was born, keeping it on the Chinese theme.

I remember you had them in a box round by Bond one night and you were like some kind of drug dealer, like “Pssst, come & check this out”….

Yeah... [Laughs.]

Because you’d never really told anyone - I remember I’d known you for a while before you told me you did customisation, and I thought you meant just drawing on your shoes or something.

Well I just thought the whole theme of the moccasin stitch on an AF1 was a good idea for a mass-marketing scheme, so I thought I should keep it top secret. I believe that still, I believe that if Nike started producing these shoes with a moccasin stitch it would be like a new category of footwear.

Like with the woven shoes...

Exactly, I kind of feel like if they’d picked up on this years ago, you know, like everyone else is doing it now – One True Saxon started doing it, Lacoste started doing it, Adidas are doing it, Gravis, all these brands are doing it. Nike could smash it, they’ve got a good product and all they need to do is add a moccasin stitch and different colourways.

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