Prince’s shoes an iconic part of his wardrobe
Footwear exhibit now on display at Paisley Park
MINNEAPOLIS — He had bespoke shoes for each and every outfit. And then some, like platform sneakers and roller skates with transparent wheels that lit up.
By official count, Prince had about 1,200 pairs of footwear housed at Paisley Park in Chanhassen, Minnesota.
Over the ankle, over the knee, zip up the side with a peace-symbol zipper pull. All custom made, of course.
An exhibit of 300 pairs of the late music icon’s shoes, “The Beautiful Collection,” went on display at Paisley Park as part of regular tours at his studio-turned-museum.
There are beaded shoes and sequined shoes, ones decorated with handpainted clouds and another with a Batman theme, fake-fur knee-high boots and footwear festooned with reproduced signatures of Queen Elizabeth I and Pancho Villa. It’s a magnificently rich, kaleidoscopically overstimulating collection that’s as dizzying and dazzling as his stage performances.
To get to the bottom of Prince’s shoes, we reached out to retired wardrobe maven Helen Hiatt, who worked with Prince from 1983 to ’91; veteran Minneapolis stylist Gwen Leeds, who worked for Prince but not as a stylist; and Paisley poobah Mitch Maguire, the museum’s preservationist who also became its managing director this spring, and we watched the exhibit’s videotaped interviews with shoemakers Gary Kazanchyan of Andre No. 1 in Los Angeles and Cos Kyriacou of City Cobbler in England.
Here are some things to know about his royal soles:
■ Prince, a massive star with a diminutive body, had a smallish foot. Hiatt, who wears a women’s size 8 or 8.5, could easily fit in his shoes, meaning he probably wore a men’s size 6.5 or 7. Not that he ever bought any shoes off the rack after 1981 or so.
■ Prince had shoes made for every outfit, usually out of the same material as the outfit. But when it came to more generic shoes — say white, black, peach or turquoise — he’d require three or four pairs of each.
“Matching the boots to the colorful suits was a bit much, it wasn’t the way one with any fashion sense normally dressed,” Leeds said. “But this was rock ’n’ roll where rules were nonexistent. And it didn’t escape me that matching from head to toe tended to elongate a rock star who was self-conscious about his height.”
■ Prince would sit with Hiatt and pore over European fashion magazines — Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan — for inspiration. He’d give her ideas, she’d draw sketches and get his feedback and take the instructions to the designers.
“I was the liaison in wardrobe for him,” said his former wardrobe director. “I did the fitting and had to come back and explain [to the designer] what was going on. Prince felt that I was good at communicating with him. He trusted me.”
■ “Style-wise, Prince’s shoes are pretty normal. For a man, they’re not normal,” Hiatt opined. “They’re just a fitted-to-foot shoe.” But with Prince, the fabric makes the shoe.
■ Some shoes were inspired by other footwear. Kazanchyan tells the story of Prince encouraging him to take a pair of Fendi shoes, deconstruct them and rebuild them with Prince’s last and chosen fabric.
For a pair of platform sneakers with lit-up heels that Prince requested, Kazanchyan went to Payless, bought some kids shoes with blinking soles and swapped the lights out and made Prince’s wish come true.
■ To help prevent heels (made of wood or plastic) from breaking, a metal brace was inserted as a wedge between the heel and the soles of Prince’s shoes. His footwear was very lightweight, consisting of fabric — often 4-ply silk, sometimes wool or velvet — fused to a backing, and, of course, Prince’s heels. Per royal wishes, the shoemaker had to source materials not made from animals.
■ Having made countless pairs of shoes headed to Minneapolis, Kazanchyan said Prince’s footwear at Andre No. 1 typically cost $800 to $2,400 and sometimes as much as $6,000 per pair.
■ Before he could afford custom-made shoes, Prince jazzed up store-bought kicks. On display is a pair of off-white Zodiac leather shoes from 1980, with a series of gold sequins added on the toes.
■ With all that fancy dancing, how did Prince make sure the audience never saw his bare legs in concert? Stirrups from the pants hooked underneath the shoe.
■ In 1989 or ’90, Hiatt went to Prince’s Chanhassen house and traced his foot on a sheet of paper to send to a shoemaker. “You could see the years of being in that high-heeled, pointy toed shoe had cramped his toes,” she recalled. “You could see foot problems, the bunions, the smashed big toe, whatever. You could see that foot had been tortured.”
She tried to persuade Prince to wear a shoe with the point closer to his big toe, but he resisted the suggestion, even for offstage shoes. “Even if it’s a half inch, it’s a big deal. He wasn’t ready for change,” she said. “He pulled me over in the corner: ‘You know I don’t like to argue.’ ”