World of Duha: An Oasis in the City

This May, Chapters welcomed World of Duha into its Milan store with Oasis in the City: a project designed around presence, intimacy and transformation.

The collaboration came to life through a dedicated window installation, an in-store activation and a special evening gathering a selected group of women for cocktails and a seated dinner inside Chapters. More than a presentation, it was imagined as a moment of encounter: between the brand and the city, between product and atmosphere, between the architectural language of Duha’s shoes and the intimate rhythm of the women who wear them.

For the occasion, we sat down with Duha - the founder - to speak about her background in architecture, the role of memory and heritage in her work, the meaning of luxury today, and why a shoe can become much more than an accessory.

1. Your background is in architecture. What did that way of thinking bring into the way you design shoes today?

Architecture taught me to consider how something bears weight. A shoe is a tiny piece of architecture for the body: proportion, line, mass-to-air ratio.

I see a shoe first as a structure, before I see it as an object. Where does it take the foot? Where does it let it go? The negative space is as important as the form.

2. World of Duha was born during a moment of pause. How did that transition shape the identity of the brand?

The pause is the reason the brand is the way it is. When you create from a place of stillness, not reaction, you don’t have to fill every silence.

That’s why Duha is quiet. The shoes are made to be looked at slowly. That quietness was built into the brand from the very beginning.

3. There’s a strong sense of storytelling behind your designs. What do you want a woman to feel when she wears Duha?

Understood. Not “confident,” because that word is tired out. When she walks in, I want her to feel that the room rebalances itself a little. That her arrival is announced before she reveals herself.

It’s the feeling I had as a child watching my grandmother walk through the door in Parisian heels. A woman shows up, and small changes happen in the air.

4. Your shoes often sit between structure and fluidity. How do you balance these two worlds in your creative process?

The foot moves, the shoe holds. That tension is the design problem, and it is also the personality.

I work between an Italian last that gives precision and a silhouette that must feel, in motion, like it belongs to her body and not to a sketch. If a shoe is only structural, it feels cold. If it is only fluid, it disappears.

5. You’ve described your design approach as a mix of opposites: minimal but bold, architectural but emotional. Why is duality so important to you?

A note is just a note. It is the tension that makes it music. I am Tunisian, brought up between the warmth of the Mediterranean and a more Swiss type of precision in my work. The brand has both.

Duality is not a stylistic choice for me. It is how I really see things. I am a woman full of contradictions. I think all human beings are.

6. Footwear is often the most intimate part of a look. How do you see shoes as a form of identity?

Shoes carry your weight. They change your posture, your stride, the rhythm of how you enter a space.

They are closer to the body than most accessories, and they are the thing that touches the ground. They are the punctuation of a look.

The shoe a woman chooses says something she might not say out loud. I love how a pair of shoes can be a conversation starter, or a reason someone smiles.

7. There’s a strong connection to memory and heritage in your story, especially through your grandmother. How does that translate into your collections today?

My grandmother was a housewife. She used to travel with my grandfather two or three times a year to Paris. She would come back wearing a new pair of Charles Jourdan heels that did something to the room.

She was happy, most probably because she had spent a beautiful time during her trip, but my brain always associated that happiness with a new pair of shoes. I was small, watching from a doorway, and I understood what it means to own something you are proud to wear.

8. Your designs feel sculptural but also wearable. How important is comfort in your creative process?

Comfort, for me, is not softness. It is the confidence of construction. A shoe made on the right last, by the right hands in Parabiago, with the right balance. That is comfort.

A woman should be able to wear the shoe for a full evening and forget she is wearing it, without the design ever shrinking to accommodate her. Effortlessness that is highly engineered.

9. World of Duha feels more like a universe than just a brand. How do you imagine it evolving beyond shoes?

I think of the brand as a world the woman steps into, not a category she shops in. The shoe is the entry point, but the universe extends to the way she is dressed, the room she walks into, the table she sits at, the trip she takes.

I see Duha eventually moving into objects and environments. Places that hold the same temperament as the shoes.

10. What does luxury mean to you today?

I think the word has been used too generously to still mean very much. For me, it has become quieter. It is specificity, time and craft.

It is a workshop in Parabiago where hands have been doing the same gestures for generations. It is the privilege of slowness, in a moment when nothing wants to be slow.

11. Your brand speaks a lot about transformation. What does it mean, for you, to “step into” a new version of yourself?

My world stopped many times and restarted the very next day. I made it through many transformations: divorce, failure, loss and grief.

I understood that this world is made of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but you should not be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.

Footwear is the moment of transformation, literally. You put your shoes on when you go out, and you take them off when you get there. That change lives in that liminal gesture: the few seconds between who you are inside the house and who you choose to be outside of it.

That threshold is of interest to Duha.

12. How important is community in building a brand today?

You do not build a brand in one image anymore. It is built in a network of conversations.

The women who wear Duha. The friends who gift it. The dinners and intimate rooms where it is passed between people. That is where the brand lives.

Algorithms can amplify a brand, but they cannot make a brand. Trust still goes from person to person.

13. If World of Duha were a feeling, what would it be?

The composure of a woman who has nothing to prove. It is the quiet that arrives just after she enters a room, before anyone has spoken. Not silence, exactly. More the sense that the air has organized itself around her.

It is the hidden jokes and the subtle humour. In elegance, always.

With Oasis in the City, World of Duha brought this universe to Chapters through an experience made of architecture, intimacy and atmosphere: a window installation, a private dinner, and a gathering of women around a shared idea of presence.

The selection is now available at Chapters, in store and online.