Fancy Footwork

Wendy Holden has a footwear fetish, but she’s no Imelda Marcos. “I’ve had shoe dreams my entire life,” she explains, adding that she satisfies her obsession not by buying shoes but by designing them. For next spring, she’s created six fanciful mules in colorful silk brocades and Sabrina-heeled sandals trimmed with rhinestones and crystals. Bearing names such as “Regency,” “Byzantine” and “Miami,” her two dozen or so artworks for the feet are anything but sensible. “I try to stay away from black and brown,” the 41-year-old designer says. “I like simple clothes but lush, exotic shoes.”

Holden moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago, after studying ceramic sculpture and earning a fine arts degree at Parsons School of Design in New York. On a whim, she enrolled in a shoe design class at Otis College of Art and Design taught by Mauricio Osorio, a master shoemaker at Western Costume Co. “He helped me realize my fanciful ideas,” she says, recalling that she designed her first shoe in 1992 after watching the flight of a butterfly. “I sketched it so that the wings were wrapped around my foot,” she says. “I called it my surrealist show shoe.”

There’s more to making shoes than daydreams, however. “Shoes are very technical,” Holden says. “Otherwise, you couldn’t walk.” First, Holden develops a prototype, then a crew of local craftspeople creates a finished sample and all subsequent shoes, which are made to order. A pair of the handmade shoes generally requires four to six weeks to complete.

Holden, who owns about 100 pairs of shoes, most for archival purposes, admires the whimsical designs of the late Roger Vivier and the inventive work of contemporary Philippe Model. But she prefers to wear her own shoes most of the time. “They’re light like fairy slippers but sturdy and wearable,” she says. “My shoes speak to a woman’s desire about what she wants to be--romantic with an edge, says a stylist friend of mine. And I think it’s true.”