In the history of dress, shoes have never been accorded quite the consequence they deserve. In the drama that is fashion, shoes are quite literally accessories, supporting characters, there to facilitate the action and way down the cast list. True, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they elbowed their way centre stage but that was probably more the result of marketing than a real shift in our perceptions. Yet, when it comes to defining gender, class and erotic intent, shoes have, through most of history, packed a bigger punch than mere clothes. It’s safe to argue that nothing else people wear has been quite so thoroughly and repetitively fetishised—a factor exploited by designers and marketers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Even so, fashion and its contemporary commentators have tended to overlook it, regarding shoemakers as artisans rather than artists or designers.
Many shoemakers have been great designers and innovators, but the first to break through those barriers of anonymity was Salvatore Ferragamo, the Italian born in respectable poverty in Bonito, near Naples, the eleventh of fourteen children, who left behind a dynasty that became a luxury goods empire. He wrote in his autobiography that he did not so much learn how to make shoes as ‘remember’, as if in an earlier life or many earlier lives he had already been a shoemaker. ‘I was born to be a shoemaker,’ he wrote. ‘I know it; I have always known it. As I look back now on the long lesson of my life I can see quite clearly how strong, how remorseless, how unrelenting is the passion within me that has driven me on and on, along a path strewn with so many hardships. Many are the times when I wondered why I was not as other men … content with the things they possessed, hankering not after the fruits of tomorrow. Yet I could not swerve from my predestined path, no matter what the cost. It was against Nature, It was against God.’
His explanation of his unlearned skill was mystical.
… but from whence does my knowledge come? It is not inherited. In later years I searched the records of my ancestors through 400 years. There was no shoemaker among them. I found many humble property owners, I found a poet, I even found an alchemist; but no shoemakers, not one. Nor have I had to learn in the accepted sense. From my first day with shoes—yes, even with the little white shoes I made for my sisters—I have remembered all about shoemaking. I have remembered: that is the only way to describe it. I have only to sit down and think, and the memory comes to me out of the days—it can only be this—when in some previous existence upon this earth, I was a shoemaker.
A lifelong experimenter with materials and structure, Ferragamo invented wedges, the rounded toe, Roman sandals, the invisible nylon shoe, the crystal-soled shoe, sculpted heels, the ‘gloved’ arch, shell soles and the stiletto heel (he called it the ‘spike’). The political and economic exigencies of his century forced his ingenuity beyond even his fertile inclination, and he developed ways to use the unlikeliest materials in shoes of seductive beauty: crystal and cellophane, fish skin, feathers, crocheted silk, satin, embroidery and mosaics of gem-cut crystals and Venetian glass beads, mirror glass, pearls, diamonds and diamond dust, raffia and cork, wood and rubber, Bakelite and nylon thread, felt and all manner of animal skin, including antelope, kangaroo and lizard.
He was certainly a determined and driven individual, certain from his childhood what he was destined to do. His parents were poor farmers, and two of his brothers trained to be tailors but, in village society, the cobbler was ‘the lowest of all the classes’ and for their son to become apprenticed to him was beneath his family’s dignity. ‘It would bring the family into disrepute,’ he recalled. It was only after he had played truant from several other apprenticeships and then, without training, sat up all night making his little sisters’ First Communion shoes from canvas and cardboard (his parents were too poor to buy any for them) that they finally relented. Long before he was ten years old he had learned everything the village shoemaker could teach him. That year his father died and, in 1909 when he was eleven, Salvatore left home to go to Naples to attempt to learn more advanced skills. Moving from shoemaker to shoemaker, spending a day here, three there, he absorbed knowledge, before borrowing money from his mother’s brother, a priest, and setting up as a shoemaker in his home village of Bonito. He was indeed a prodigy, not only in terms of skill and talent but also in his precocious business acumen. Rapidly he developed a good business making shoes for the local gentry. In 1912, he was persuaded to join his older brothers and sisters, all of whom had emigrated as they became old enough, in America. At fourteen he made the long sea journey alone, pausing only briefly on the East Coast to dismiss the shoe factory where his brother-in-law worked and head out West to join his brothers in Santa Barbara, where they opened a shoe-repair shop and Salvatore began his meteoric career as shoemaker to the stars—first on set and then in their private lives.
He was only twenty-four when he followed the fledgling movie business to Hollywood and took out an enormous $35,000 bank loan to open his Hollywood Boot Shop on the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas Boulevards. Next to the shop was his workshop, and he developed a small manufacturing operation as well as employing ever increasing numbers of outworkers. Gradually he developed links with factories across the country, sold wholesale to stores throughout America and his own shop became focused on retail. He was commissioned by Cecil B. de Mille to put shoes on the feet of the actors and hordes of extras in The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings and also shod D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East and The White Rose as well as James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon.
He would research archaic costumes in the library, but there was little recorded so, once more, he ‘remembered’ it—very successfully. He also studied anatomy at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. Although his creativity and inventiveness in terms of style and materials were boundless, his real quest was comfort, the secret of which he discovered through his study of anatomy. The weight of the body is borne by the arch of the foot, he learned; that is what needs supporting while the ball of the foot and the heel (the areas most shoemakers prefer to support) should float free so that the bones and muscles can move as nature intended. As a consequence, any dancer who had worn a pair of Ferragamo’s shoes refused to wear any other. All Hollywood’s leading ladies wore Ferragamo, from Mary Pickford to Ava Gardner, from Jean Harlow to Marilyn Monroe, from Katharine Hepburn to Audrey Hepburn.
When the machine production did not measure up to his high standards, Ferragamo decided to move back to Italy where he believed he could employ enough skilled artisans to make his shoes by hand. His return to his native land in 1927 was initially a disaster and, owing to greedy backers in America, deceitful debtors and perfidious creditors plus recalcitrant Italian shoemakers, ended in bankruptcy. Ferragamo paid all his debts, real and fictional, over the next few years, rebuilt his business and acquired the Palazzo Feroni-Spini in Florence and the Villa II Palagio at Fiesole, on the hillside overlooking the city.
Then the larger world handed him another reversal of fortune. In 1935, Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and in 1936, the League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy, killing Ferragamo’s export trade and cutting off his sources of raw materials. Ferragamo was forced to new heights of resourcefulness. Fiddling with the wrapper from a chocolate while seeking a substitute for the fine kid skins that could be painted silver or gold for evening shoes, he came up with a fine rolled transparent cellophane tube enclosing a gold or silver thread. It was strong and it was glamorous. The second invention forced upon him by necessity at this time was the ‘wedgie’. He could obtain only low-grade steel at this time, and the shanks on his shoes were continuously snapping. After much thought he tried filling in the space between the heel and the ball of the foot, sculpting Sardinian cork. He then persuaded the most fashionable duchess in Florence to wear the wedge to church—and the queues formed on Monday morning.
By 1939, Ferragamo was shoemaker to most of the royalty of Europe as well as that of Hollywood. At one point, he recalled, four queens were being fitted simultaneously in his Rome salon—the queens of Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain and the Belgians. Queen Elena of Italy was a devoted customer, and he also made boots and shoes for Mussolini—thereby curing his corns and calluses—and for the dictator’s wife and mistress as well as Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. ‘How was it possible,’ he demanded in his autobiography, ‘for a bankrupt in 1933 to own within five and a half years a great palace and a beautiful villa and, above all, to number among his clients the greatest names in the world?’
His answer was that his unique fitting system permitted ‘Nature’ to effect a cure of the ‘crippled feet’ of his clients. His theory was that many ills, from bad temper and obesity to insanity, could be traced to ill-fitting shoes. Throughout his career the style of the shoes, although an endless source of joy to him, was never as important as the structure and fit. He wrote:
Normally I do not institute new fashions. There are a number of dress and shoe designers who struggle to be different for the sake of being different, meaning that they want to impose a startling new fashion line upon the woman but if designers must wait for their customers to become conscious of new styles who, then, determines fashion? The answer is: new fashion begins in the mind of the designer. He must not stifle all his ideas merely because the world is not yet ready for them. I have no season.
The war that broke out in 1939 meant the collapse of business as his workers were called up into the army and trade ceased. The 41-year-old Ferragamo took advantage of a period of relative inactivity to find a wife. Wanda Miletti, the daughter of the doctor and mayor of Bonito, was twenty-three years younger than he was, but it was love at first sight for both. Their six children were all to work in the family business. In 1947, on a trip to the United States to accept a Neiman-Marcus plaque for ‘distinguished services to fashion’ he shared the voyage with Christian Dior (of whom he had never heard). The two designers were astonished to discover that Ferragamo’s shoes complemented Dior’s clothes perfectly—both had instinctively been working in the same materials, colours and mood. ‘I had for many years,’ he reflected, ‘believed that the fashion trend is not the exclusive prerogative of one designer but is “in the air”—a sort of manifestation of the world will, if I may put it like that—with the result that two men, working 400 miles apart, unknown to each other and with widely different means of inspiration (I draw my creations from my memory, while Dior prefers to find his inspiration from practical items like paintings and drawings) can arrive at similar conclusions at the same period in time.’
Further reading: Salvatore Ferragamo’s autobiography (1957), Shoemaker of Dreams, is still an essential read. For a good historical perspective, see Stefania Ricci’s Salvatore Ferragamo: Evolving Legend 1928–2008 (2008) and for an understanding of the whole field, see Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil’s Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers (2006).