The Shoes of the Master

By Richard Stengel

MAGICAL THINGS, SHOES. Myths and fairy tales are cluttered with them. There is the old woman who lived in a shoe and the young woman, in Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, who died for one. Cinderella's glass slippers and Dorothy's ruby pumps still tiptoe around the imagination. In the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana, the exiled king leaves behind a single memorable token: a pair of gold-encrusted shoes. Newlyweds once routinely tied a pair of old brogues behind their coach or car for good luck. In the Middle Ages the well-to-do wore poulaines, shoes with pointy, turned-up toes that were thought to ward off witches.

Salvatore Ferragamo, a stocky, wavy-haired Italian shoemaker who first apprenticed himself to a cobbler when he was nine years old, was a magician who worked with feet. He well understood the talismanic power of shoes, their ability to enchant and arouse, to dazzle and intrigue. He created shoes that were walking fantasies. But at the same time he was a craftsman who understood how a pair of ill-fitting shoes can ruin a day and how a pair of clunky shoes can make a duchess feel dowdy.

Shoes cannot simply adorn; they must protect and support. As a design object, they unite form and function, utility and style. Ferragamo's shoes were as engineered as a suspension bridge and as theatrical as a butterfly. "Elegance and comfort," he once wrote, "are not incompatible." From the moment he began making shoes in 1907 until his death in 1960, his motto was that women did not have to suffer to be beautiful; shoes did not have to pinch to be chic.

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 encouraged him to create shoes that were extravagant and unique; and it was Hollywood that encouraged women around the world to wear them.

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.

By the 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 of Southern California to learn how better to accommodate the 26 bones of the human foot.

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 of leather over wooden models of feet. Those were his rough drafts.

For 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 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 in 1978.

Ferragamo's series of delicate "invisible" shoes (1945-47), which used pieces of clear nylon to create the top piece known as the vamp, were inspired by his observation of the taut, translucent lines of fishermen along the Arno River. The swooping heel of these shoes is also nautical, shaped like the keel of an America's Cup yacht. "The toes," he once said, "should always be free to swim."

For 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, not overt, their allure coming from the fact that they simultaneously revealed and concealed, which is the secret of all eroticism in fashion.

Ferragamo was both couturier and courtier. The exhibition features many pictures of the natty shoemaker on bended knee, cradling the foot of one of his glamorous customers, like Sophia Loren, the Duchess of Windsor (who, he said, had perfect feet) and Ava Gardner. He was an artist for hire who worked for the new royalty of the 20th century: movie stars and socialites. Such clients tested his ingenuity. To fulfill the request of an Indian princess, he once fabricated a shoe of hummingbird feathers. But Ferragamo asserted that he was designing shoes not for the personality of the customer but the personality of the age. James Laver, the influential English fashion theorist, wrote that all significant fashion shares three qualities: utility, status and seductiveness. Ferragamo's shoes satisfy on all counts.