At age 21, Art major Elijah Dalley is already making headway in his career. During his time at University of California Santa Cruz he started designing shoes out of recycled materials which landed him in the London Design Festival 2024.
Dalley spent all of the 2023-2024 school year studying abroad in London. During Fashion Week he attended a show for Helen Kirkum, an artist and designer who also makes shoes and other items out of recycled materials. There Dalley met the curator for the London Design Festival which resulted in him and Kirkum on the same panel talking about sustainability in shoe wear.
The panel discussion, Dear Wellington Boots, was accompanied by a project to redesign the classic Wellington rain boot in a more sustainable way. There was supposed to be a show, but due to supply chain issues it has been postponed until 2025, where Dalley’s boots will finally be seen.
His time in London was not Dalley’s first immersion into international travel. Raised in Fullerton, his mom worked at the university there. She occasionally taught on study abroad trips leading to her son spending parts of his childhood in Paris and England.
During high school Dalley stayed in Fullerton and attended Troy High School, a prestigious public institution which students have to test into given the school focus on technology and STEM. Dalley joined the multimedia track where he could study movies, music, and more.
When he came to UC Santa Cruz Dalley he planned on studying graphic design. “However, I didn’t want to be pigeon holed into that industry,” he says. “In the art program here you don’t have to choose a focus, you can kind of do whatever your heart desires.” Which is how he eventually got into shoe design.
In making each pair, Dalley does a lot of dumpster diving and going through donation bins. “When I was in high school, I waited outside stores, and then I came here and realized that’s not the most environmentally sustainable or protective thing,” he says. “Then people just throw them away when they’re not cool anymore.”
In using a collection of old shoes, he is able to go around patents to use technologies that are kept separate, such as the Nike air units and Adidas foam, thereby creating a better shoe. A lot of Dalley’s work involves dismantling the power of brands while also recognizing the cultural role they play. “It’s one thing to say brands are irrelevant, which they are, but at the same time, I don’t think you can get rid of that and say it’s insignificant to our history and culture at this point.”
Dalley also had a show at the senior gallery earlier this quarter. On his website one can order custom made shoes for around $500. With all this early success it’s clear that sustainability is at the center of the future of fashion, and Dalley has a long and successful career ahead of him.