With equal parts delight and frustration, the founders of MSCHF admit what they do can be hard to categorise.

That is partly the point.

The Brooklyn-based collective operate at the intersection of art, pop culture commentary and consumer pranks.

Also: humour, absurdity and critique.

They have a particular penchant for skewering designer fashion, and our curious and often unhealthy relationship with it.

They are perhaps best known for The Big Red Boot, the bright red, bulky and oversized footwear that was a signature of Astro Boy, the Japanese manga and anime character, which became a viral hit after the made them for real, and released them as a limited-edition, wearable art piece in 2023, priced around £400.

There has been other headline-grabbing footwear.

The Jesus Shoes were a pair of Nike Air Max 97 trainers, modified to include holy water from the River Jordan in the soles, a gold crucifix pendant hanging from the laces, and red insoles said to resemble the colour of Christ’s blood. They retailed for $1,425, a reference to Mathew 14.25 in which Jesus walks on water. “And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.”

The Jesus Shoes were followed in 2021 by Satan Shoes.

These were another pair of modified Air Max 97s, this time with human blood in the sole, an upside-down cross pendant on the laces and “666” stamped on the side. These retailed for $1,018 – a reference to Luke 10:18. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”.

Sneakers are the tip of the iceberg.

MSCHF’s products/ideas are released in drops, at the rate of one a fortnight.

These have included Puff The Squeaky Chicken, a familiar rubber chicken toy modified to become a bong that squarks when you smoke it. Alexagate, a device that sits on top of an Amazon Echo that may be toggled on and off to shut down Alexa’s always-on listening capability, and hence “stop Jeff Bezos spying on you”. The Free Movie, a frame-for-frame recreation of Jerry Seinfeld’s forgettable 2007 animation The Bee Movie, entirety compromised of crowd-sourced scribbles.

Then there was the Microscopic Handbag, a neon-green 3D-printed take on Louis Vuitton’s OnTheGo tote, that was only visible through a microscope and created for Pharrell Williams – “He loves big hats, so we made him an incredibly small bag”.

And Key4All which flipped the idea of Zipcar on its head, since it was a set of 1,000 identical keys that all unlocked the same car. (To find the vehicle, divers were invited to call MSCHF’s car location hotline, which offered hints to its whereabout in New York City.)

Naturally, there have been lawsuits.

MSCHF’s Birkinstocks were pairs of Birkenstocks’ Arizona sandal made from destroyed Hermés Birkin bags.

It’s Wavy Baby trainers, from 2021, took inspiration from Balenciaga’s Triple S shoes, known for their bulky, exaggerated style, and applied wavy, squiggly contours to the soles and uppers of shoes that were recognisably familiar lines from Adidas, Vans and Reebok.

Nike was understandably displeased about their shoes being associated with both Jesus and Satan.

But those perhaps pale in comparison to the 2020 MSCHF Boston Dynamics controversy.

For this one, the collective released “Spot’s Revenge”, which involved taking the quadruped robot “dog” created by the robotics and artificial intelligence research company, and modifying it with a paintball gun.

The already unsettling droid was then videoed lurching around shooting stuff, a weaponised version of itself, straight out of Robocop.

A “significant” backlash ensured.

None of this has stopped the pranksters from raising a reported $20m in Series A funding, as per 2021, their unique blend of art, marketing and technology, plus their high rate of virality, being catnip to investors.

Quite how said investors hope to get their money back is, you suspect, not MSCHF’s problem.

If getting a handle on precisely what it is that MSCHF do, and why it exists, has proved elusive, a new book, marking its tenth anniversary, provides clues.

As one might expect, Made by MSCHF, published by arthouse book company Phaidon, is a lavish, visually rich almost-400 page doorstop of a book, that surveys the work of the collective, via case studies and thematic essays.

Esquire recently spoke to Kevin Wiesner and Lukas Bentel, chief creative officers at the company, about their work.

The pair were in Tokyo, days away from opening a new exhibition, titled Material Values.

“We’re literally at the back room of a gallery,” Bentel said, as was obvious from the stacks off bubble-wrapped canvases piled up behind them, on the Zoom screen.

“There’s a lot of work ahead of us.”

Esquire: What didn’t you want this book to be?

Kevin Wiesner: We didn’t want it to be a “coffee table book”. Where it’s just pictures and pictures and pictures. Especially because so much of what we’re making are websites – they’re interactive, they’re honestly very hard to print. So, there ends up being quite a lot of writing. Which we hope is sort of describing our working process and how MSCHF approaches executing any of our works. Even internally we’ve always struggled to articulate what makes a MSCHF project. Writing about a dozen projects at significant length was a way to articulate ourselves.

Lukas Bentel: I hope it’s a very educational book. Just in terms of just explaining the thought process, it you read through the projects. Hopefully it leads to other people making work in a similar vein

A number of influential names have contributed essays to the book. The award-winning Pentagram designer Natasha Jen writes about the Satan Shoes, for example. She says: “This endeavour wasn’t merely a dalliance with the absurd, but a meticulously crafted critique of the digital, saturated ethos of our consumer culture and the increasingly fluid boundaries of brand in the contemporary lexicon”. Does that kind of highbrow thinking apply to every MSCHF project? Or do some fall under the category of: “We did this one because it made us laugh?”

LB: I think there needs to be something that brings people in. If it’s humour, or an aesthetic. The thing we often say is “It has to slap in one sentence”. It’s okay to have the fun, as long as there’s some substance to it.

KW: This is something we always navigate. I think people want to look at MSCHF’s work and think that it all can be described in the same way. I don’t think that that’s true. There are things that are primarily meant to be visual. They are things that are intended from the get-go to be specific critiques. And there are things that are much more experiential.

One of the things we have as a pillar of the way MSCHF operates is that we release a lot of things. We hold ourselves to a very strict schedule because we feel like we need to put a gun to our own heads. And that means that… our output varies tremendously. The temptation for people is that as soon as one of them can be analysed as a satire or critique, they go, “Oh, that must be the same for every single project”. But it’s not that homogenous.

But something like Puff The Squeaky Chicken, surely that’s just meant to be funny? There’s no deeper meaning there?

KW: [Laughs] Some of those early ones were us figuring out: “What are we even doing?”

LB: It wasn’t like we had the clearest divisions right from the get-go. It’s been a practice. It’s ever evolving.

KW: The chicken is actually an interesting example. In the context of the rest of the work you can see a thread of sampling specific cultural elements, right? The chicken bong is just stupid and fun, and it was the first physical project that we ever made. We learned a lot from doing it, but it’s derived from the same thought process that gets us to Satan Shoes. We’re looking for things that exist in the world, that we can build other things out of.

The squeaky chicken was culturally ready-made. On the internet, it had a particular connotation. [A meme denoting an embrace of randomness and/ or absurdity]. It was huge at that time, when Vine was still a platform. It was one of these objects that recurred over and over again, in a certain type of content. It was sitting there as something that we could pull from and build on. Would we say it’s one of the 12 case studies that we’re proudest of? Absolutely not. Is it a product of the same process [we used later]? Yeah, I would say, absolutely.

Other ideas, like Key4All, require a crowdsourcing element. You release them, and then its up to other people to figure out what to do with them.

KW: Oh, one hundred per cent. It’s something we do over and over again. We create a set of props or conditions for a performance that’s not going to be done by us. It’s going to be done by as many people who can interact with it as possible.

If you’re keeping up a schedule of a drop every two weeks, how far ahead are you working on ideas?

LB: Generally, a year out. If not longer.

What stops you going cold on something? Ie: A project that got you excited in spring 2024, feeling passé by spring 2025?

LB: There’s been a few times where we’ve “course corrected”.

KW: We make a point not to start working on an idea soon after we have it. You want to put it on a board, and then you let it sit there for six months. And the final test: are we still excited about it? After the initial buzz of coming up with the idea has worn off.

How do you find the people who’ll manufacture all this different stuff? Are you constantly cold-calling companies saying: “Would you be interested in making us an Alexagate?”

KW: The short answer is, basically: yes. But the nice thing is, oftentimes, we’re ringing up manufacturers or companies, and we’re asking them to do something that’s much more fun than what they normally get to do. We have a good hit rate with those with those calls where we say, “Hey, do you want to make…?” Whatever it is.

Is there anything you haven’t been able to get made?

LB: There always is. Or just things that are really hard to do right now.

Can you talk about the process for the Birkinstocks?

KW: The nice thing about Birkenstock, as a sandal company, is they sell every piece of their shoe individually for repairs. Because that’s the kind of company that they are. Hermès does not do that. So, we bought some Birkin bags, and basically, we walked around Brooklyn with the bags. And we went into leather-working shops and asked: “Hey, could you take this apart?” Like, render it back into flat sheets, so we could make stuff? We had several people who point blank refused us. “Get this project out of my shop!” But then, fortunately, we did find someone. We also found a place that was doing small-batch shoe runs. It really was just a matter of coordinating several different suppliers. It took a little bit of convincing. We also did have a bag stolen from the shop.

LB: One person that we worked at the start basically cooked a bag. They did a very bad job.

KW: I think we also had a stack of fake Birkins that we got off [New York souvenir/ counterfeit designer goods mecca] Canal Street, so we could do some test runs on them.

Leaving aside the copyright issues around the actual items you created, you also co opt other elements of a brand’s IP. The Birkinstock product page on your website, for example, is in a font that’s meant to remind people of Hermès. Is all of this protected by the First Amendment rules on free speech? Is that how you get around it?

KW: That’s a good question. We always think it is, right? [Laughs] Pretty much whenever we’re dealing with copyright, we believe that we are operating within our bounds as artists. People who are sampling culture – in the same way that in music there’s a rich sampling culture. I think art history has pretty firmly established that as standard practice. You know, from Warhol onwards, the sort of appropriation of corporate imagery in particular is very – let’s say “normal”.

Now, as far as the law is concerned, that’s a much harder question to answer. And we’ve had to learn more about it than we ever wanted to. And honestly, the thing that was most surprising to us is just how not settled it is. It’s actually incredibly difficult to answer the question you’ve just asked in a way that I feel confident about, because it’s constantly being relitigated. Andy Warhol lost a fair share of these cases. His foundation lost a fair use lawsuit in the last couple of years. Don’t we all feel like he got away with this, several decades ago? Why are we still talking about this?

Apparently, you share a lawyer with Barack Obama.

LB/KW: We do. Yeah.

So, what happens in, say, the Wavy Baby case? Is it a back-and-forth with the shoe companies, until the case is eventually dropped?

LB: I think that one ended up just settled. I think all the lawsuits we’ve had have just settled, ultimately.

Meaning, you had to pay out?

KW: Ultimately, it was decided outside of trial, right? So, we reach an agreement with – in this case – Vans. They do “X”, we do “Y”, and we mutually agree to drop the suit. We don’t have to do a formal resolution.

Is all publicity good publicity?

LB: It’s all been better for us, publicity-wise. I think a lot of people also think that there’s some sort of point with us trying to get sued. But as artists we’re never trying to…

KW: …it’s not like it’s trying to make us look cool, challenging a large brand like that. It’s a huge pain in the ass. It’s not the point of the work. I don’t think any of the major lawsuits that we’ve ever had has come from a project where we were expecting to have them. We’ve been shocked.

What about the Boston Dynamics robot dog?

LB: That never resulted in any lawsuit. Although they did release some statements…

KW: We bought that thing. We can do whatever we want. Honestly, it’s shocking that they could deactivate it. Like, can Apple nuke my laptop right now? Because they don’t like that I’m talking to you?

That was a project with a serious point. It was an anti-war protest.

KW: Yeah. They got their start with military funding. [In its early days, the company received significant funding from the US military, notably the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA). It has since pivoted to commercial sales.]

The Satan Shoes had your blood in them. Did that present manufacturing difficulties?

LB: The blood actually came from all of us [ie: the MSCHF staff]. And it was early on enough that we were personally making all of the shoes ourselves.

You’ve made a point of not repeating yourselves. Except, maybe, in trainers and fine art. What’s the appeal of those categories?

LB: I think fine art is much more understandable [for us]. We’re coming also from more of a fine art background, so it was a way of looking at the world that made sense. And then footwear was something we completely stumbled into by accident. And then, to be honest, because we got sued by Nike, it seemed there was a reason to continue making shoes.

You weren’t at all sure that the Jesus Shoes would sell, is that right?

LB: That was shocking as well. That was only, like, our seventh project.

KW: In no way were we conceiving them as products. No one would ever wear these, right? We were very far outside of the sneaker world at that time. But there was this whole secondary market dynamic to them. This idea that they were these pseudo-investment vehicles. At the time we were working on the Jesus Shoes, we were kind-of like blindsided by it. I think there was a sense that sneakers as an object were in some kind of cultural ascendancy. But we really did not understand the mechanics of it. I also think there was a bit of making fun of that whole space.

The idea being: who would be the ultimate collab? Well, that would be Jesus?

KW: Yeah, exactly.

Do you like it when celebrities wear your stuff? Drake, for example?

KW: I guess, yeah. It’s a good way to get an idea out there.

Do big brands pitch to you now?

KW: Every once in a while. It depends how big we’re talking. It’s rare that a big brand has any idea what it wants.

Would you be open to collaborating, or is it a flat no?

LB: If you have a good idea that needs an outlet, and someone’s approached you that seems could make that idea happen, maybe it makes sense.

KW: If we’re ever going to do stuff like that, usually the way it works is that if we’ve had an idea, and the only way that we could get it done is to work with a partner to execute it, then we figure out how to make that happen. You were talking about the fine art world earlier. That’s actually how we ended up getting gallery representation. We had this idea for an ATM with a leaderboard on top of it, for your bank balance [the MSCHF ATM Leaderboard, from 2022, displayed participants’ photos, plus their accurate bank balances, on a ranked screen above the cashpoint]. We thought that the only space that could really live would be Art Basel in Miami. So, we had to figure out how to get into Art Basel. And it turns out the only way you can is that you have gallery representation.

LB: We tried to do it by contacting the Basel organisation directly. And they were, like, “Do you want to pay us a lot of money for a corporate [space]?” They didn’t understand what we were trying to do. So, then we went and found somebody that would let us show.

How does MSCHF make money?

KW/LB: [Laugh]

Do you actually make money?

LB: Sometimes!

KW: The line that we always use, which is the most accurate, is that at the end of the day, we make and sell objects. And that is how MSCHF makes money. What are those objects? Well, obviously, since we have doubled down on sneakers, that’s a line that has been a recurring vertical with MSCHF. Sometimes it’s, you know, car keys.

Can you talk about the Big Red Boot? Did you have any inkling it would go as nuts as it did?

LB: I don’t think anybody could have ever expected it to go as nuts as it did. Because I don’t think any shoes have really gone as nuts as quickly. It was one of the greatest peaks, and then declines, of any object I’ve ever seen in my life. I think we thought it would do well. I don’t think we had any idea where, how big it was gonna get.

KW: We thought it was an image that could travel. It had a lot going for it. Did we think that people would buy it as a product? I mean, again, no. There’s always a question of how people are going to interact with something like that. One of the things that we have often talked about is the difference between putting images into the world and putting objects into the world. And the Big Red Boot is like a great example of the extra potency of objects. Which is basically: that other people can then make more images of them, right? It’s a pretty interesting case study from that perspective.

Although, for us, it was one of these things that rapidly escaped our control. Like we were talking about with the car keys, and some of these other things. There’s a performance that is done not by us, right? There’s a life to these things that’s in the hands of the crowd. So when Lukas is talking about the incredible peak-to-valley contrast of the Big Red Boot, we were trying to take what was originally, you know, a cartoonish form, and basically execute it at a very high production standard, and position it as a fashion object. And it had this spike where it was sort of being perceived in that vein. And then, as it proliferated everywhere, it became this inescapable meme. It was just so saturated onto Instagram that people really got annoyed by it, and it sort of roughly collapsed back into this jokey thing. It was a real whiplash moment for us, where we were trying to do this context transposition, and it sort of like jumped into a new context and then like slingshotted all the way back to where it started.

LB: It was interesting! You get to try to elevate it, and then it just imploded.

KW: Right. We were sort of upset at the time.

Because people had misunderstood it?

LB: Well, I think at first, they didn’t. As soon as it launched, it had a lot of interest as an image. And was really put on a pedestal. I’ve never seen so many inbound people asking us to give them stuff to take a photo with, and how much they would offer to buy it for. And then the fakes started being made of it. As soon as that happened, it just it devalued the image so much. And people started wearing it in ways that were really bad.

KW: It was very briefly this really highly desirable thing. And then it very quickly became this “avoid at all costs” thing. What’s the opposite of a desirable commodity? Anti desirable?

You can’t honestly be grumbling that someone has bootlegged one of your products?

KW: We do think it’s funny now, actually. Because as we sat down to write about it for the book, the more we came to appreciate its whole life cycle. And now when we come to The Free Movie project, with the hand drawn frames… We initially ran it with Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld. And not just because the pun worked with the name, but because this intellectual property that has this second life that has only been shaped by the way the internet relates to it, right?

Like it was a completely forgettable, stupid movie. But the one line where [Seinfeld’s character] Barry B. Benson says “You like jazz?”, out of context, just proliferated so heavily online. Like nobody has seen that movie, but basically everybody knew that one little five-second snippet, right? So, it had this totally crowd-mediated life. So, I think we had a knee-jerk reaction that, we lost control of the Big Red Boot. But it’s also that encapsulation of a particular way that the internet owns things that, generally, we really like. So I do think we came back around to it, when we had some distance.

Is your job as fun as it looks?

LB: Yeah, it probably is.

My favourite MSCHF fact is that one of your employees, Josh Wardle, invented Wordle. It sounds like something you’d make up. But it’s true, right?

LB: He did that before joining MSCHF. Literally, the two weeks before he joined. And then it exploded. And then he worked with us for, like, two years, and then he left. Honestly, he had some pretty big, pretty big things to work on himself. But, yeah, it’s totally true.

Made by MSCHF by Lukas Bentel and Kevin Wiesner with Karen Wong is published by Phaidon priced £59.95.