Word: shoes
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...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...
...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...
...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...