00:00ZERO's mission is to destroy gender.
00:02Destroy gender!
00:04My name's Henry.
00:05I'm Shaboh.
00:06And we are the co-founders of ZERO.
00:08Well, I've always worked in the fashion industry,
00:11and I've always worked in shoes,
00:12and I've always wanted to wear feminine shoes,
00:16but they never fit my big feet.
00:20So I decided that I would start a line
00:24that would cater towards my needs.
00:26Around the time that we started,
00:28I wasn't aware of any other brands
00:30that were doing what we were doing.
00:32I've been wearing women's shoes forever,
00:34but stuffing my feet into the largest women's shoes
00:37I could find because there weren't brands
00:39that catered towards feminine footwear in larger sizes.
00:43That's what ZERO does really successfully,
00:46is to integrate a feminine footwear interview every day.
00:50The process of developing our shoes is very instinctual.
00:54If you want a kitten heel,
00:55which is definitely something that I wanted in life,
00:58you couldn't find that.
01:00So we just kind of had to pull from our own introspective inspirations
01:04to create the dream shoe.
01:06ZERO shoes are designed specifically to fit wide man feet.
01:10But the funny thing is that a lot of women tell me that their feet is really wide.
01:16So then it always makes me think that women's comfort is not part of that process.
01:20The comfort of the person who's wearing it is totally like the afterthought.
01:26But for us, that's like the first and foremost thing.
01:29Because we want these shoes to be worn every day to the grocery store.
01:33And you can't do that if you can't stand or can't walk.
01:36When you look at how clothing has been so gendered across time,
01:40and how those gender binaries have changed,
01:43it really kind of just shows that the idea that men don't wear nails,
01:48and that men don't wear heels is just a thought of the now.
01:53And that everything is subject to change always.
01:56We just find it so interesting that societies have such a strong influence
02:00on what all of this means.
02:02When at the end of the day,
02:04I'm just trying to wear a heel.
02:06I'm just trying to have nails.
02:08And maybe a woman is just trying to get to work in pants and a sneaker.
02:13Maybe there's nothing more to it than that.
02:15When men were wearing heels in like the 17th, 16th century,
02:19like in the French court,
02:21that's very different than us wearing heels now.
02:25They were celebrated.
02:26They're celebrated. There's no safety issues.
02:28But the fact that we're wearing heels now,
02:30we're constantly being put at the edge of, like, violence.
02:34Whether it's verbal abuse or actually physical aggression.
02:38The first time I ever saw another person other than myself wearing the shoes
02:42was our models for our very first photo shoot ever.
02:46And when I saw them gagging over the shoes,
02:49it really reassured me that this isn't just something that I've wanted
02:53and something that I've dreamed up in my own head.
02:55That there is an audience out there that wants these things.
03:00The first time I saw someone out with our shoes, I was so starstruck.
03:05It was like I saw a celebrity.
03:07I was really feeling a sense of empowerment, a triumph of seeing our shoes,
03:14a symbol of femininity that is disrupting the patriarchy on someone else.
03:20It was very validating.
03:22The fashion industry has immense power and ability to change and adapt.
03:28And as I see the gender lines being blurred more and more in the way that we all dress,
03:33I can see something like Ciro being more relevant to more and more people, which is beautiful.
03:39Our vision of the future is for Ciro to be, like, a mecca of choices for gender non-conforming style
03:47fashion.
03:48We're all born naked and the rest is drag, you know?
