TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050492/0504560.000

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                                                                                FASHION, Page 72

The Shoes of the Master


An enchanting exhibition of Salvatore Ferragamo's creations
reveals how these most pedestrian yet glamorous of objects can
embody the sole of an age

By RICHARD STENGEL


    Magical things, shoes. Myths and fairy tales are cluttered
with them. There is the old woman who lived in a shoe and the
young woman, in Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, who
died for one. Cinderella's glass slippers and Dorothy's ruby
pumps still tiptoe around the imagination. In the ancient Indian
epic the Ramayana, the exiled king leaves behind a single
memorable token: a pair of gold-encrusted shoes. Newlyweds once
routinely tied a pair of old brogues behind their coach or car
for good luck. In the Middle Ages the well-to-do wore poulaines,
shoes with pointy, turned-up toes that were thought to ward off
witches.

    Salvatore Ferragamo, a stocky, wavy-haired Italian
shoemaker who first apprenticed himself to a cobbler when he was
nine years old, was a magician who worked with feet. He well
understood the talismanic power of shoes, their ability to
enchant and arouse, to dazzle and intrigue. He created shoes
that were walking fantasies. But at the same time he was a
craftsman who understood how a pair of ill-fitting shoes can
ruin a day and how a pair of clunky shoes can make a duchess
feel dowdy.

    Shoes cannot simply adorn; they must protect and support.
As a design object, they unite form and function, utility and
style. Ferragamo's shoes were as engineered as a suspension
bridge and as theatrical as a butterfly. "Elegance and comfort,"
he once wrote, "are not incompatible." From the moment he began
making shoes in 1907 until his death in 1960, his motto was that
women did not have to suffer to be beautiful; shoes did not have
to pinch to be chic.

    Ferragamo's mixture of prettiness and practicality is
sumptuously on view in "The Art of the Shoe," a 30-year
retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The
exhibition, which will run through June 7, is a shrine to
Ferragamo's shoes, with dramatic spotlights illuminating the
glass cases containing his handiwork. The 199 shoes in those
cases were chosen from among 10,000 in storage at Ferragamo
headquarters in Florence. The Los Angeles setting is
appropriate: Ferragamo got his start as a custom shoemaker while
living in California between 1914 and 1927. It was Hollywood
that first encouraged him to create shoes that were extravagant
and unique; and it was Hollywood that encouraged women around
the world to wear them.

    Ferragamo's life story too has a once-upon-a-time quality.
He was born in a remote hill town outside Naples, the son of an
impoverished farmer. In his autobiography he recounts that when
he was nine, his parents were distraught because they could not
afford a pair of traditional white Communion slippers for his
six-year-old sister. The afternoon before the event, Ferragamo
borrowed tools from a friendly local cobbler and stayed up all
night making a pair of perfect white canvas shoes for his
sister.

    By the time he was 14, Ferragamo had his own shop, with
six assistants. That same year he emigrated to Boston to work
with a brother in a shoe factory. Disgusted with what he
considered the clumsiness of machine-made shoes ("with a toe
like a potato," he wrote), he journeyed to Santa Barbara and set
up a shoe-repair shop with another brother. Soon he was making
cowboy boots for early westerns. Cecil B. DeMille hired him to
make fanciful sandals and leggings for his silent epic The Ten
Commandments. At the same time, Ferragamo was studying anatomy
at the University of Southern California to learn how better to
accommodate the 26 bones of the human foot.

    Ferragamo returned to Italy in 1927, establishing himself
in Florence, and eventually the world beat a path to his door.
Along with Andre Perugia and Roger Vivier, he became one of the
great shoe designers of the 20th century -- a century when shoes
came into their own as hemlines first rose above the ankles.
Whereas Perugia's shoes are more exquisitely balanced and
Vivier's have more graceful lines (he made Ferraris for the
feet), Ferragamo was the great improviser and engineer. He
thought with his hands. He never made drawings of shoes, but
constructed them by pulling pieces of leather over wooden models
of feet. Those were his rough drafts.

    For Ferragamo, necessity was the spur to invention. In the
1930s and '40s, metal and leather, the staples of shoemaking,
were scarce in wartime Italy, so he experimented with what came
to hand -- straw, raffia, bark, even fishskin. Another local
material, cork, launched one of his greatest inventions, the
wedge. The precursor of the familiar wedged heel was a shoe with
four corks from local wine bottles sewn together to make a heel.
Later in the 1940s, he made uppers of cellophane, after noticing
how strong and durable the material was when he twisted a bunch
of candy wrappers at his desk.

    While some of Ferragamo's wedged shoes are sedate, others
are fantastical, and a few are downright ugly. But even these,
like a black-laced shoe with a prow toe shaped like a rhino's
horn, work as sculpture if not as footwear. One wedged shoe made
in 1938 is a kind of psychedelic homage to the raised Venetian
chopines of the 17th century; it could easily have been worn by
Elton John in concert in 1978.

    Ferragamo's series of delicate "invisible" shoes
(1945-47), which used pieces of clear nylon to create the top
piece known as the vamp, were inspired by his observation of the
taut, translucent lines of fishermen along the Arno River. The
swooping heel of these shoes is also nautical, shaped like the
keel of an America's Cup yacht. "The toes," he once said,
"should always be free to swim."

    For Ferragamo, the high heel was the pedestal on which he
placed women. "The high heel gives a beautiful shape to the
leg," he wrote. The crocodile uppers of a court shoe (a sort of
dramatized pump) made for Marilyn Monroe in 1958 shoot back at
a 45 degrees angle, resting on 5-in. stiletto heels. It was a
pair of Ferragamo high heels that Monroe was wearing in The
Seven Year Itch when the warm air from a subway grate famously
raised her skirt. Ferragamo's shoes were sexy without being
trampish. His come-get-me shoes were elegant, not overt, their
allure coming from the fact that they simultaneously revealed
and concealed, which is the secret of all eroticism in fashion.

    Ferragamo was both couturier and courtier. The exhibition
features many pictures of the natty shoemaker on bended knee,
cradling the foot of one of his glamorous customers, like Sophia
Loren, the Duchess of Windsor (who, he said, had perfect feet)
and Ava Gardner. He was an artist for hire who worked for the
new royalty of the 20th century: movie stars and socialites.
Such clients tested his ingenuity. To fulfill the request of an
Indian princess, he once fabricated a shoe of hummingbird
feathers. But Ferragamo asserted that he was designing shoes not
for the personality of the customer but the personality of the
age. James Laver, the influential English fashion theorist,
wrote that all significant fashion shares three qualities:
utility, status and seductiveness. Ferragamo's shoes satisfy on
all counts.