The man who lifts Lady Gaga into the style stratosphere

Lady Gaga is not the kind of person to be upstaged. Yet a quick glance at a recent slew of music videos, performances and magazine covers confirms that she is not always the centre of attention: her shoes are.

Tall, towering, gravity-defying and surreally bereft of heels, Lady Gaga's shoes have become one of the most enduring symbols of the popstress's unconventional sartorial style.

She accessorised with a ruby red pair of towering shoes for a Rolling Stone cover; she tumbled off another heel-free pair at Heathrow Airport and slipped into a white pair for her Alejandro video.

The man behind many of theseavant garde structures is Noritaka Tatehana, the Japanese shoe designer whose creations are at once bold and modern and rooted in traditional aesthetics.A rising star of the shoe design world, Tatehana - still only 25 and just one year out of university - makes fantastical creations that happily blur the boundaries of fashion, art and craftsmanship.

And his heels are just as likely to appear in art galleries as to adorn the feet of the famous: not only does he have a string of exhibitions already under his belt, but New York's FIT Museum snapped up his autumn/winter range last year for its permanent collection.

His latest collection of shoes, fashioned from laser-cut metallic leather, are displayed in an exhibition of his works at Trading Museum Comme des Garçons in Tokyo.

It is on a quiet Saturday afternoon at another art gallery space in Tokyo's upmarket Aoyama district that I meet with Tatehana to uncover the secrets behind his extraordinary structures.