Improvisation, repair, craft and street style converge on the streets of Accra, where a sculptural mule by Giles Tettey Nartey transforms everyday movement into design, now available at Dover Street Market Paris.
Giles Tettey Nartey has teamed up with Demon Footwear to create the GTN Mule, now landing at Dover Street Market Paris. The shoe itself is tight and clean in silhouette, but the campaign is where it starts to feel lived in, set directly into the street rhythm of Accra.
The collaboration links back to their architecture school years at Politecnico di Milano, where Nartey met Alberto Deon, later the head of the Italian heritage label. The mule carries that shared training in its build, engineered and precise, yet designed to move through real days. It is made from three locally sourced black leathers chosen for how they pick up texture over time, so wear becomes part of the surface.
Accra gives the project its tone. Shot on the street, the campaign reads like a portrait of how style actually works in a city: outfits pulled together fast, repairs that become details, craft that sits inside the everyday rather than behind glass. The mule appears inside that flow, worn by local characters who bring posture, gesture and attitude to the frame. Nartey has described the logic he was looking for as “improvisation, repair, craft, street style, and the choreography of daily movement.”
That focus lines up with his wider practice, rooted in Afro-Atlantic material cultures and the way objects hold cultural memory and social meaning. Here, the point is simple: a shoe that looks sculptural, walks easily, and feels at home in the street.
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