ONE STEP LED TO GIANT LEAP FOR FERRAGAMO.
The word “genius” is very fashionable in the fashion galaxy. In Salvatore Ferragamo’s case, though, it’s entirely justified. Born in 1898 in straitened circumstances in a small southern Italian village, he left school at nine and made his first pair of shoes at 10 — white, for his sister’s confirmation. If he hadn’t, she would have gone barefoot.
He set up his own shoe business at the age of 12, conquered Hollywood by the time he was 20 and had gone bankrupt at 27, before rising in triumph, to swaddle the world’s feet (or that bit of the world that could afford his handmade shoes) in comfort and inventively avantgarde style.
There are so many implausibles in the previous paragraph, we may as well begin with the starry stuff and his domination of Hollywood. Not that Hollywood was located in Hollywood in those days.
When Ferragamo first went west in 1914, it was to work alongside his brothers in a shop in Santa Barbara, more than 125 kilometres north of Hollywood and close to the American Film Company studios (later 20th Century Fox), where Cecil B. DeMille directed most of his masterpieces. The movie industry hadn’t yet coalesced around Hollywood. When it did, Ferragamo sensibly followed.
He was the first go-to cobbler to the stars: John Barrymore (dreadful shoes had made him “flat-footed”), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Pola Negri, Dolores del Rio, Rudolph Valentino and, later, Gloria Swanson (“perfect feet that never aged”), Marlene Dietrich and, later still, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, all wended their way to him.
He knew Clara Bow “long before she was an It girl and at a weight, I might say, of 150 pounds.” She had tremendously strong, high dancer’s arches and he made her fourinch heels that, in those days, were thought to defy the laws of gravity.
With that kind of back catalogue, it’s not surprising that when the great and the extremely wealthy of Los Angeles clubbed together under the leadership of one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists, Wallis Annenberg, to convert the Beverly Hills Post Office into the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the Ferragamo family was a natural to sponsor the gala opening.
Held a fortnight ago, it was quite a turnout of old and new Hollywood — from heavily jewelled, frail-looking and eerily preserved socialites to Gwen Stefani, Amy Adams, Demi Moore, Freida Pinto and Gia Coppola.
“We feel very connected to this town,” Ferruccio Ferragamo, the chief executive and, at 65, the eldest son of Salvatore’s six children, explains a few hours before the party. “My father left Hollywood in 1927 and never went back to live there, but he would talk about his time there to us children. The link with celebrity was never forced or manufactured.”
That much is clear from Shoemaker of Dreams, Salvatore’s fascinating — and, to modern eyes, artless — autobiography, which was first published in 1957, three years before his death. When Salvatore met the wardrobe director of the American Film Company in about 1915, his ambition wasn’t to dress movie stars on the red carpet but to improve the tawdry workmanship of the cowboy boots many of them were obliged to wear in the early silent Westerns.
When the talent saw, and felt, how good his cowboy boots, Native American moccasins and Roman sandals were, they soon placed personal orders.
But even when he was most feted, and Marilyn was wiggling her way through his doors, all Salvatore was really interested in was the fit of his shoes. “I love feet,” he wrote. “They talk to me. As I take them in my hands, I feel their strengths, their weaknesses, their vitality or their feelings. A good foot is … a masterpiece of divine workmanship. A bad foot … is an agony.”
The book features plenty of glamour — as well as drama, with Ferragamo escaping imprisonment by the Nazis back in Florence. But Salvatore only really reaches poetic heights when he’s talking about bunions, corns and dropped arches. “As I take these feet in my hands,” he wrote, “I am consumed with anger and compassion: anger that I cannot shoe all the feet in the world, compassion for those who walk in torment.”
There are plenty of us who know the feeling. Salvatore devotes pages of his autobiography to the tortured soles he encountered during his career. This was long before the era of cushioned trainers. If a woman’s shoes pinched, which they often did, she had no option but to suffer, or stay at home in her slippers.
Women would make the pilgrimage to his store as the sick and weary do to Lourdes, overweight and limping: he was often their last hope. Months later, kitted out with made-tomeasure shoes and, in some instances, several stones lighter after regaining their mobility, they would bound back to his shop for more — fans for life.
He was so intrigued by the travails of the human foot that he studied anatomy at university in America and it was while there that he discovered the weight of the body is carried by the middle of the foot arch. Support the arch correctly, he believed — and repeatedly demonstrated with a patented steel arch that he incorporated into the instep of every Ferragamo shoe — and you were halfway to solving most foot problems.
What’s so remarkable about Ferragamo is that, far from directing his energies into orthopedic wear, he designed some of the most glamorous, original shoes in history.
Platforms? He produced gold ones in the 1930s, and came close to doing a flatform as well.
The wedge? He pretty much invented the modern version in the 1940s, when steel rationing meant that he could no longer find a sufficiently strong insert to support his high heels.
Cork soles? Another of his eureka moments, also born of wartime privations.
Sadly, Salvatore’s dream of curing the whole world of its foot ailments could never be. The company, which listed on the stock exchange two years ago — although the family retains a controlling 69 per cent — turns over $1.5 billion a year (a figure that includes its very chic ready-to-wear), sells in 90 countries, and now produces almost all its shoes (in Italy) by machine.