Maguire's newest store in Brooklyn, New York

If there’s one thing Myriam Belzile-Maguire wants people to know about shoes, it’s how much work goes into each and every pair. “To make one pair of shoes, imagine 50 different components. All these 50 elements come to your factory at the same time so that you’re able to produce, and then on the production line, the shoes can touch maybe 60 different hands,” she says. “Sometimes people are looking at shoes with a magnifier, and they’re trying to find the mistake. But it’s all part of the art of making shoes.”

That art is a subject the Montreal creative knows a thing or two about. Alongside her sister Romy, Belzile-Maguire is the founder of Maguire, an independent shoe brand that focuses on quality and transparency in its production and stylish contemporary designs.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Belzile-Maguire has dedicated her life to shoes. She had strong opinions about footwear from the time she was a toddler, and as she grew up, she loved how a great pair of shoes could bring an otherwise simple outfit to life—the special ingredient to take it from blah to unforgettable. “Everyone wanted to be a clothing designer,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, but who’s making the shoes, and where do you study to make shoes?”

Myriam Belzile-Maguire

Cordwainers at London College of Fashion, as it turns out, one of the most prestigious shoemaking programs in the world, with a roster of notable alumni including Jimmy Choo, Linda (LK) Bennett, and Camilla Skovgaard. Belzile-Maguire found it by using the internet to translate chaussure and searching for “footwear” programs. “I wanted to do that from before I was able to speak English.”

After graduating, she went on to work for large brands including United Colors Of Benetton and Aldo and design shoes for dozens of white-label brands (where items are created by one company and sold under another) such as Target, Kohls, and Opening Ceremony.

Quickly, though, Belzile-Maguire became disillusioned with the world of fast fashion—from the waste to the huge margins to the lack of creativity. “I was like, this is not what I’m dreaming of,” she recalls. And like many millennials, she witnessed first-hand the meteoric rise of fast fashion, followed by a shattered illusion when its realities set in. Nowadays, she doesn’t set foot into Zara because she realized it was creating a false sense of need, and her closet was overflowing with poor-quality items.

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“Working in shoes, I had access to a sample of anything I wanted, basically, but I realized what I really wanted was just a nice pair of leather boots that won’t fall apart after two months,” she says. “Because at the end, I didn’t need all these shoes. So that inspired me to start my own brand.”

The opportunity to make the leap came in 2017 in the form of a $15,000 bonus after a particularly good year at her job. At the time, it felt like a huge sum, but it was only enough for a first run of 200 pairs of sneakers (100 in black and 100 in white).

Still, after many years of testing and trial and error, working part-time jobs, establishing relationships, and the mentorship of an old boss at Aldo, Maguire has grown into a thriving women’s shoe brand with a roster of small producers. Alongside her sister, who leads operations and marketing, Belzile-Maguire now works with a handful of small-batch factories, mostly in Italy and Spain, that prioritize ethical craftsmanship. And by bringing its shoes directly from the factories to consumers, Maguire is able to lower the cost of producing such high-quality items without compromising on fair wages.

The brand outlines exactly where all its shoes come from and why they cost what they do right on its website. When she started Maguire, Belzile-Maguire was convinced this level of transparency would quickly become mainstream, but eight years later, it’s still fairly rare—and a stark contrast from the hush-hush approach of fast fashion’s mass production. “I feel like if you don’t give information to people, they don’t know they’re making a bad decision or a bad choice,” she says. “It just makes you realize that if a shoe is $20, maybe someone was not paid right in the chain.”

The dedication and hard work have paid off—last year, Maguire was awarded Accessory Designer of the Year at the 2024 Canadian Arts & Fashion Awards. Latest on that list of achievements is a new store in Brooklyn, the brand’s second in New York and fourth overall (there are also bricks-and-mortar stores in Montreal and Toronto).

The Williamsburg shop is an homage to colour, with touches by plenty of Canadian creatives, including interiors by Perron Design, lighting by A-N-D Light, and artwork by Jéraume. It’s the perfect backdrop for Maguire’s new spring/summer collection, a diverse range of ballet flats, loafers, and sandals in bright hues (and a few staple colours too), plus plenty of pattern and texture, including cowhide and polka dots.

As for her own wardrobe, lately Belzile-Maguire has been reaching for simple sneakers, though she’s excited to turn to loafers and ballet flats as Montreal’s weather gets warmer. But one constant is that she always wears her own shoes—though not out of a sense of superiority. “Otherwise, I’d have too many,” she says with a laugh. “Every time I want to buy a new pair, I’m like—no.”

Photographs by Jonathan Hökklo. 

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