Word: toe
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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...
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...
...morning I visit Felix and the battered radio is tuned to a Greek station broadcasting out of Lynn. Felix wears black wool pants, a short-sleeved office shirt open at the collar, anonymous black shoes, and a blue denim smock smudged with glue stains. He is rebuilding the worn toe of a woman's two-hundred-dollar cobalt-blue Salvatore Ferragamo...
...Alfred Stieglitz picked up the scent of Georgia O'Keeffe. In the oversize Polaroids that Wegman started making in the late 1970s, Man Ray can be found patiently enduring whatever new conceit his master would visit on him. Dusted in flour, tricked up as an elephant, wrapped head to toe in Christmas-tree garlands, he had the comic gravity of Buster Keaton and the acrobatic ambiguities of a four-legged pun. The pictures made Wegman, until then a lesser-known Conceptualist, the kind of artist who gets invited on Carson and Letterman. Four years after Man Ray died...
...this case, the real issue certainly is censorship--a censorship imposed by those who would tell us how to live our lives, what positions we can and cannot hold in society, and just exactly how we should toe the "real" politically correct line...