If free soloing (using only rock shoes, without the protection of a rope) is the purest form of climbing, then aid soloing is the slowest, most cumbersome kind one can imagine, mixing, as it does, terror and tedium.

WSJ: Training for the Big Wall | By Michael J. Ybarra

His shoes don't have a look, he tells me, "because the person who buys custom-made shoes does it for himself, not to show off. (Unless you're a rock star.)" But there's a distinctive sensibility to his work: imagination reeled in by disciplined line--even the model with the partial red-suede upper.

FORBES: The Sole of Stefano Bemer