Passions Grounded in Shoes : Fashion: Fanciers enjoy the exquisite materials, the craftsmanship and the comfort of expensive footwear.
Oliver Rose knows how to retaliate. After his wife nearly kills him in the marital-discord film, “The War of the Roses,” he saws off the heels of her many splendid shoes.
On screen, wife Barbara Rose’s vast collection, enshrined museum-like behind wall-to-wall glass doors, may look far-fetched. But the next time you exchange small talk with a well-heeled female, ask how many pairs of shoes she owns.
The answer could knock your socks off.
In New York and Los Angeles alone, there are women with collections ranging from 70 to 700 pairs. Right up there with them is Mary Trasko, ) author of the coffee-table tome, “Heavenly Soles,” (published last fall by Abbeville Press), who keeps an adored Roger Vivier pump, given to her by the designer, in the china cabinet of her New York apartment.
What leads seemingly rational (and not always rich) women to such extremes? By their own and expert accounts, they think of beautifully made shoes as art. Wearable sculpture. Poetry in motion. On a more down-to-earth level, they revel in the exquisite materials, the craftsmanship and the comfort they say can only be found in expensive footwear.
Added to that is the ease. “Buying a pair of shoes is not like buying a pair of pants,” notes one retailer. “There’s far less ego involved. A woman doesn’t have to get undressed.”
Trasko calls members of the haute shoe-buying clique “shoe collectors or shoe enthusiasts. I wouldn’t say fetishists, because that’s more of a sexual thing.”
Yet every enthusiast can name a designer who sends her into ecstasy. For Trasko, it’s Vivier, the Frenchman who purportedly created the stiletto heel and made a silver pump with a “ball of diamonds” heel (out of rhinestones) for Marlene Dietrich.
The savvy also rave about French-born Maud Frizon, known for her fanciful, flirtatious pumps; London-based Manolo Blahnik, a specialist in sexy evening mules; Italian Andrea Pfister, designer of the 1979 “bird cage” shoe that spawned millions of plastic imitations, known as “jellies”; Robert Clergerie and Stephane Kelian, French designers dedicated to simple, stylish footwear.
They also treasure Parisian Philippe Model, whose capricious flair influences both his hats and shoes; fellow Parisian Christian Louboutin, who works in unusual materials, such as palm bark and fish skins; Walter Steiger, son of a Swiss shoemaker, who creates classic, architectural footwear in Italy; New-York-based Susan Bennis and Warren Edwards, designers of flights of fancy that are on display in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Prices for fine footwear can range from about $200 to more than $1,000, although some lucky collectors have found vintage shoes in thrift shops for as little as $15.
Michael Leeson, screenwriter and co-producer, says the idea of destroying shoes in “The War of the Roses” occurred to him during an argument with his wife. They were walking to their car, exchanging verbal blows, when she stopped mid-sentence to stare at a window filled with Walter Steiger footwear.
Leeson demanded to know how shoes could be more important than the tiff at hand. His wife’s only response was, “ ‘Shh,’ ” he recalls. “I was standing behind her and I thought of sawing the heels off her shoes. If I were going to do something really hurtful, it would be through her shoes, because women do have this unnatural attachment to their shoes. They are almost mystical in their importance.”
“I hate to say it, but if it’s between the rent and a great pair of shoes, shoes win out. That’s what some customers tell me,” confides Teri Ragsdale, manager of the Maud Frizon boutique on Rodeo Drive.
A more affluent customer--hooked on Frizon’s handmade lasts (the inner structure of each shoe) and whimsical details--once left with 12 pairs of the $300-and-up footwear. And a novice made off like a bandit the day her Frizon-loving mother let her sample the children’s collection.
“This little girl could barely talk. So when her mother asked her which shoe she wanted, the lavender or the black, she picked up one of each,” recalls Ragsdale. The Beverly Hills moppet got a pair of each, at $250 a throw.
Madeleine Gallay, owner of the Sunset Plaza boutique with the same name, says her grown-up customers wear Manolo Blahnik’s mules ($330-$600) “with anything from blue jeans to ball gowns. Shoes and accessories are the most important things these women own. All a dress has to do is look good. But they have to love the shoes and accessories. I agree with them. These are the things that express who you are.”
At Ecru on Melrose Avenue, manager Elizabeth Kellin expresses appreciation for one customer, an artist, who is seriously considering decorating her living room with all the Robert Clergerie shoes she owns.
In Kellin’s own closet are “100 pairs of shoes, if not more.” Depending upon past associations, some are her “happy shoes,” others are “sexy shoes,” still others are “power shoes,” including one pair of low-heeled Clergerie oxfords that always bring her the job she wants.
She professes to “love shoes more than jewelry, and I take exceptionally good care of them.”
She has them waterproofed, gets toe guards put on the tips of the soles and keeps her shoes in boxes inside cloth travel pouches “so they don’t hit against each other.” If they need a light cleaning and brushing, she does that. If more is required, she takes them to a place where she has seen miracles worked: the Shoe Doctor on West 3rd Street in Los Angeles.
Tips from other footwear fanatics include: Stuff shoes with tissue or shoe trees. Keep them in original boxes (worth more to future collectors that way). Avoid the rain. Waterproof soles with mink oil or polish. Ride, don’t walk, in very delicate shoes.
One Los Angeles woman, who insists on anonymity, says she and her husband recently moved into a beautiful new home: “But the joke is, all I really wanted was a closet for my shoes. It would have been a lot less expensive.”
Now she keeps 70 pairs on specially designed shelves behind Plexiglas. Among her favorites are black suede Maud Frizon flats trimmed with silver bells, which she wears only in December “and never to the theater” (the noise, you know). She was so excited when she bought them in New York a few years ago, she telephoned her husband in Los Angeles with the news.
Author Trasko can easily explain such behavior: “Shoes are more seductively sculptural than any other element of fashion.”
After she began collecting Viviers several years ago, Trasko gradually threw out all her other footwear (except some plastic rain boots) and became a different person: “I’m happy to say, it has changed my life just to wake up in the morning and put on a perfectly designed pair of shoes.”
“Because they complete the picture, shoes do present the possibility of perfection,” concurs Stella Resnick, a Los Angeles psychologist and footwear collector.
They also “confer power. Heels make you taller. Then there’s all the emotional symbolism (such as) stomping your feet. Language really attaches a lot of powerful emotions to our feet. Shoes protect them and make them less vulnerable.”
When Oliver Rose saws off those heels, “it’s obviously a violent gesture. He paid for those shoes; he was taking them back in a sense,” observes Resnick.
Several scenes later, Barbara Rose gets revenge by destroying her husband’s beloved Staffordshire china. But for shoe enthusiast Elizabeth Kellin that isn’t good enough: “I would have blown him up.”
BACKGROUND
Cynthia Emmel, director of communications for the National Shoe Retailers Assn., says the average woman in the United States owns 15 to 20 pairs of shoes and spends $50 for a pair of quality pumps.
