Silver and Gray Define the Season
If you’re looking to be in step with fashion this season, French shoe designer Robert Clergerie suggests investing in a pair of low-heeled pumps, preferably in silver or gray and definitely made of butter-soft kid leather. Oh, yeah, and don’t forget to pick up a pair of black or red rubber-soled Mary Janes and men’s-style oxfords.
Clergerie was one of a handful of celebrated European shoemakers--including Manolo Blahnik, Giovanna Ferragamo and Andrea Pfister--who traveled to Los Angeles recently to help put a little kick in America’s closets this fall.
Clergerie’s suggestion is to look for shoes devoid of heavy ornamentation, which Clergerie sees as the amateur’s crutch.
Surrounded by Neiman Marcus shoppers slipping their feet into a pair of the designer’s classic brown satin or black suede platforms (priced around $300), the designer offered, “When an idea is strong, the best way to express it is simply.”
Although other shoemakers may question Clergerie’s minimalist approach to design, most agree with his pronouncement that gray is the season’s most versatile color.
Ferragamo, daughter of the late Salvatore Ferragamo and ladies’ ready-to-wear designer whose work helps define the Ferragamo footwear collection each season, is especially enamored of a gray flannel dress pump with an 8-centimeter heel and matching handbag that she sees as this fall’s bestselling twosome.
The Ferragamo shoe collection, which had been overseen by Salvatore’s other daughter, Fiamma Ferragamo until her death in November, also contains an element of surprise this season. A chain embedded in the heel of a pair of brown-satin evening pumps or leather ornamentation on classic rubber-soled suede and calfskin moccasins, priced from $180 to $275, looks very modern. Nevertheless, insists Giovanna Ferragamo, women probably shouldn’t get too attached to any of these cheeky styles.
“For next spring, my collection is inspired by the Orient,” she says, describing her loose, caftan-like mandarin jackets and cropped drawstring slacks worn with unobtrusive thongs and barefoot-looking sandals with low plexiglass heels.
You won’t hear Blahnik pushing any barely-there styles this or any other season. The dashing, Milan-based shoemaker, whose boa-covered mules, two-tone strappy pumps and colorful rhinestone sandals have graced the feet of everyone from Anjelica Huston and Paloma Picasso to Sigourney Weaver, among others, has long been a believer in funky footwear that spans generations. As Madonna once noted of Blahnik’s shoes: “They last longer than sex.”
Dressed in a 20-year-old hand-tailored suit from Anderson & Shepherd, the venerable Savile Row tailor who holds a royal warrant to make clothing for Prince Charles, Blahnik is a walking example of fashion with staying power. During a personal appearance at Neiman Marcus, where he installed his own natural linen furniture for the occasion, Blahnik eyes a customer in a short skirt and vintage strappy metallic pumps.
“I get a kick out of seeing women wear shoes I did 10, 20 years ago,” he muses. “This one just happens to still look good on her.”
Blahnik’s bestselling shoes, which sell from $300 to as much as $2,600 a pair, always have his signature tapered vamp, and mix materials with abandonment and whimsy. His favorites this fall are his collection of high-heeled pumps combining satin with pony skin or printed animal hides with passementerie. He also relishes the shock value in a pair of side-buttoning Mary Janes lined in fluorescent-colored satin.
If Blahnik has a rival for producing irreverent footwear, it’s probably Pfister, the Italian shoemaker whose open basket-weave plastic sandal is among the world’s most widely copied shoe style. Pfister was in L.A. being feted by the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising with a 35-year retrospective of his best work that ended Saturday. Among the more than 300 shoe styles included in the exhibition is Pfister’s collection of silver and gold evening slippers encrusted with cabochons, and a virtual garden party of suede pumps and mules topped with satin roses, daisies and other posies for the toesies.
“I surround myself with flowers at home, and I use them in my designs because they make a women feel happy and pretty,” says Pfister, explaining his flora shoe fetish.
While Blahnik has promised to relaunch his men’s shoe collection for fall, Pfister, who wears red-suede Gucci loafers to the opening of his exhibit, says he is less inclined to follow the leader because, as he notes, “you can’t put flowers on men’s loafers.”
