Softness Is The Sharpest Edge in Sneaker Design

By Caterina Mongillo, aka Metagirl

If time has taught me anything, it’s that it isn’t real in the way clock hands try to measure it. Time only comes alive when you move through spaces, whether physical or mental. The faster you move, the more you experience, the more lessons you collect.

That’s how I’ve lived the last three years. I left a corporate job that didn’t belong to me, freed myself from prefabricated structures, and started building Metagirl, my studio, my identity, my obsession. It wasn’t easy. Moving fast meant making mistakes. But mistakes became lessons, and lessons became a career.

When I was younger, people said I was doing too much, too fast. At one internship, they nicknamed me “DHL.” What they didn’t see was that I was already gathering the material I needed: instincts, experiments, failures, fragments that would come back to serve me again and again.

That instinct still guides me. I don’t waste time fighting the patriarchy, the copycats, or the haters. Fighting keeps you stuck in the past. I’d rather create for the future, for my community, the people who feel something when they wear my designs or start projects of their own because they saw my work.

Boundaries have been another lesson. To balance intuition, experimentation, and collaboration with big brands, you have to know when to say no. I don’t aim for perfect balance, though. Chaos often brings the breakthroughs. Some of my best ideas come from mess.

All of this came full circle with “Daughter of the Moon,” my first commercial sneaker with Saucony. The collaboration began on a full moon in November 2023, when Saucony’s Jason Faustino reached out after reading about my work. 

From that moment, the pearl — a symbol of my earliest customs — became the center of the design. I hand-sculpted the heel counter in UV clay, embedded a pearl, and finished it with chrome nail powder before Saucony’s innovation team scanned it and brought it into production.

The shoe became its own universe. Lilac accents pulled from Sailor Moon’s Perle. Silver overlays shimmered like moonlight. Archival references to Saucony runners from 2007 and 2011 grounded it in history. A sand-toned midsole was added at the last minute, inspired by Tyla’s sand dress at the 2024 Met Gala. What started in my bedroom became a sneaker in a lunar-stamped box, sold around the world.

For me, that’s what time is: collecting, transforming, connecting. I want Metagirl to keep moving in that direction, shifting from raw experiments into more intentional evolution.

Because in the end, time only matters when you create something worth remembering.