Word: ferragamo
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...