INNER SOUL
How a man obsessed with healthy feet came to design some of the most glamorous, original shoes in history.
THE word “genius” is trendy in the fashion galaxy. In Salvatore Ferragamo’s case though, it’s justified. Born in 1898 in a southern Italian village, he left school at nine and made his first pair of shoes at 10 — for his sister’s confirmation.
He set up his own shoe business at 12, conquered Hollywood by 20 and had gone bankrupt at 27, before rising again in triumph.
When Ferragamo first went west in 1914, it was to work alongside his brothers in a shop in Santa Barbara, 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 followed.
He was the first go-to cobbler to the stars: John Barrymore, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino Dolores del Río; later, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich; and, later still, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn.
With that kind of back catalogue, it’s not surprising that when the great and wealthy of LA 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 Centre for the Performing Arts, the Ferragamo family was a natural to sponsor the gala opening. Held last month, it was quite a turnout of old and new Hollywood — from heavily jewelled, frail-looking socialites to Gwen Stefani, Amy Adams, Demi Moore, Freida Pinto and Abbie Cornish.
“We feel very connected to this town,” Ferruccio Ferragamo, the chief executive and, at 65, the eldest son of Salvatore’s six children, tells me 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. The link with celebrity was never forced or manufactured,” he says.
That much is clear from Shoemaker of
Dreams , Salvatore’s autobiography, 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 how good his boots, moccasins and Roman sandals were, they soon placed personal orders.
But even when he was most feted, 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.”
He was so intrigued by the travails of the human foot that he studied anatomy at university in America and discovered that the weight of the body is borne by the middle of the foot arch. Support the arch correctly, he believed — and demonstrated with a patented steel arch he incorporated into the instep of every shoe — and you were halfway to solving most foot problems.
What’s remarkable about Ferragamo is that, far from directing his energies into orthopaedic 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 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. He made shoes from hummingbird feathers and tree bark, sculpted heels to look like cork-screws, and designed a two-part sock-and-shoe, decades before Prada and Valentino.
He was both profoundly serious about the importance of well-crafted footwear, and delightfully playful. He was also a masterly marketer. A publicity stunt to find the world’s most beautiful legs and feet yielded acres of publicity, and a then-unknown Joan Crawford, who was a runner-up.
They were not cheap — a pair of serpent shoes he designed for actress Esther Ralston cost $150 back in the ’30s (which makes £350/R5 800 for a Ferragamo Varina pump today seem a snip). But he refused to compromise. He earned numerous patents.
“He had golden hands — he couldn’t actually sit down and draw a shoe,” says Ferruccio, “so he made everything on the foot”. For years, he also refused to embrace the machine age, rather making everything by hand.
It couldn’t last. Unable to fulfil his burgeoning orders, he was bankrupt by 1929 — not helped by the Wall Street Crash.
Back in Italy, where he bought a historical palazzo in 1938, he began again and found a wife, Wanda, who was 18 to his 42.
It was Wanda, now 92, who kept the business together when Salvatore died, putting each of her six children in charge of a specific division.
Fiamma Ferragamo went on to design that Vara pump, which is still a best-seller.
Sadly, Salvatore’s dream of curing the world of its foot ailments could never be. The company now turns over $1.5-billion a year, sells in 90 countries, and produces almost all its shoes (in Italy) by machine. But, as James points out, “We still have 95 different lasts, and offer four widths in most of our styles.”
That’s three more widths than any other fashion house. I’d like to buy all my shoes here.