How Golden Goose Created a Storybook Forest in a Venetian Warehouse

Venice has long been home to not just stunning art and architecture but ancient crafts—many of which were driving forces during the Renaissance—that still thrive along the narrow canals that crisscross the city. It’s one of the reasons the city is so clogged with tourists for much of the year. But fashion is not so much a Venice thing—and sneakers even less.

That didn’t stop two locals, husband and wife Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo, from founding Golden Goose in the nearby industrial regeneration zone of Marghera in 2000. They started out with artisanal, genderless clothing before expanding into footwear with vintage-inspired boots in 2004. The really big break came a few years later, in 2007, when the brand introduced the pre-worn, scuffed-up Super-Star, an homage to the skate shoes covered in battle scars that the founders spotted on a trip to Los Angeles.

Golden Goose built a reputation in Italy and beyond with those sought-after kicks, but even now calling it a “sneaker brand” isn’t quite right. To this day, tightly curated fashion lines for men and women complement the shoes without pulling the brand away from the futzed-with footwear that put it on the map.

Speaking of maps: Lay one out and you’ll need 232 pins to mark the locations of all of Golden Goose’s worldwide stores. In each one, you’ll find staff members—called “Dream Makers”—who will assist you in finding a great pair of jeans or further distressing and ornamenting a pair of sneakers to make them just that bit more you. The brand’s Marghera complex is emblematic of that deep approach to immersive experiences and also the location of Haus, the brand’s cross-cultural artistic showcase that has hosted collaborators to time with the opening of the Venice Biennale since 2024.

The full dinner setup at Forest for the Trees.

Last month, the brand tapped multidisciplinary studio Playlab Inc. to create The Forest for the Trees, a multisensory hymn to nature that encompassed everything from video and sound to food by Michelin-star Reggio Emilia chef Emilio Da Gorini in a vast hangar surrounded by a life-size forest of painted trees. The creative duo behind Playlab, Archie Lee Coates and Jeff Franklin, describe their company as a studio with no focus, which is certainly evidenced in a back catalog of work that features ad campaigns, books, happenings, exhibits, films, retail spaces, and products—“anything,” according to Lee Coates, “that we’d like to exist in the world”—as well as ideating the late Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton men’s runway shows.

“We love the practical,” says Lee Coates. “I mean, we’re not anti-AI or anything, but we like practical things. We made 11 runway shows with Virgil. We made handmade video sets for Post Malone. We care about the real and something you can hold, see, feel. With Golden Goose, we wanted to create almost an immersive Hollywood backdrop sort of set that transported you to a storybook that didn’t quite exist.”

Jeff Franklin and Archie Lee Coates of Playlab Inc.

One of Virgil Abloh’s early shows in 2020, for which Playlab created the outdoor café setting, featured oversize seats for the fashionistas to sit on, so big their feet didn’t touch the ground, much like a child’s would. Childhood innocence was central to the concept at Haus too. It meant, as well as viewing the series of rooms, guests painted their own miniature trees before placing them in a similarly diminutive re-creation of the show’s end point, the main hangar where dinner was served.

“I think we’re living in a world where it’s so cynical that you could look at that as corny,” Lee Coates says. “But Jeff and I are optimistic people, and so we wanted to create something that almost brings you back to that childlike state.”