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F O O T P R I N T THE TRACKS OF SHOES IN FASHION

Geert Bruloot

Hettie Judah

Dodi Espinosa

Foreword by Geert Bruloot and Eddy Michiels

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Introduction by Kaat Debo

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Stepping On The Moon

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Conversations

The Foundations

Roger Vivier - Pamela Golbin Salvatore Ferragamo - Mrs. Wanda Ferragamo Manolo Blahnik

Patrick Cox

Jean Paul Gaultier

Freedom & Fantasy Terry de Havilland

Tokio Kumaga誰

Robert Clergerie

A.F.Vandevorst

Ann Demeulemeester

Testing the Limits Martin Margiela

Jurgi Persoons

Dirk Bikkembergs

Lines of Beauty

Dries Van Noten Stephen Jones Tabitha Simmons Romeo Gigli

The Body and Power

Azzedine Ala誰a Helmut Lang Nicholas Kirkwood Pierre Hardy

28 38 48 72 80 86 94 102 124 134 142 152 156 178 186 190 198 218 226 236 244

Raf Simons

Giuseppe Zanotti

On the Streets Prada

Gianvito Rossi WeberHodelFeder

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Credits

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Colophon

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278 288 298 306

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Coccodrillo invitation Spring-Summer 1988

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The Coccodrillo shoe store, Nieuwe Gaanderij, Antwerp, 1984

FOREWORD

When we started Coccodrillo more than thirty years ago, we wanted to show our vision on modern fashion to the world, the art and beauty of shoes as precious objects, amazing examples of craftsmanship and also the work of upcoming creative and visionary people.

So, when Lannoo as a publisher approached us to make a book on shoes, we decided that it should be a testimony to all the exceptional people whom we had met during our career: people who all where obsessed with contemporary fashion, creation and development of shoes, who not only inspired and fascinated us, but who also expanded our vision giving us a reason to present their creations to a wider public.

We have been very lucky to be able to meet and work with the designers that shaped fashion as we know it today, whom where fascinated by our artisanal approach to the retail industry.

Our love for beauty and creativity has always been our only reason for keeping Coccodrillo, with the intention of showing and sharing our discoveries to our costumers.

We are strong believers of the inseparability of the person and his work; true and timeless values in creation can only be the result of bright personalities and visionary designers.

So, after sharing their creations with you for the past three decades, it is a pleasure and an honour to present to you here our conversations with the people behind the enigmatic shoe collections who inspired us and fed our passion for creativity.

Geert Bruloot and Eddy Michiels

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INTRODUCTION

The cover of this book features a picture of one of the most iconic shoes in the fashion world of the last three decades. The tabi boot by Maison Martin Margiela’s combines the traditional Japanese tabi sock, an ankle sock with a split between the big toe and the other toes, with a seventies-inspired chunky round heel. Introduced by Maison Martin Margiela in their very first Spring-Summer collection in 1989, and later recreated in every following collection in the most diverse variants – as pump, sandal, boot or as a deconstructed shoe where the sole is only attached to the foot with cellophane tape – this design has become one of the key creations of this fashion house. The red footprints on the cover are a nod to the very first Maison Martin Margiela show: a momentum that would forever redefine the fashion world. Margiela made his models walk through a bath of red paint with tabi boots on before entering a catwalk covered with white cotton. The red-stained cotton catwalk was reworked in the next collection into a waistcoat and used as the opening silhouette to the show. Few people know that Geert Bruloot and Eddy Michiels are the ones who introduced Martin Margiela to the manufacturer who dared to produce this unusual shoe and thus made it possible for the tabi boot to see the light at all at the end of the 1980’s. A few years earlier, Michiels and Bruloot had already cast eyes on the shoe collection of debutant designer Dirk Bikkembergs. His robust shoe designs for men, with laces that passed through an eyelet in the heel, were instant pioneers and resolutely broke with the then prevailing men’s image that promoted a much slimmer silhouette. Renewed shoe design – a combination of craftsmanship, technical ingenuity, beauty, and emotion – has not left this duo since.

The story of their Antwerp shoe store, Coccodrillo, reads like a never-ending quest for creativity, inspiration, and renewal. More than thirty years of Coccodrillo also produced a unique collection of designer shoes that Michiels and Bruloot gave to the Antwerp Fashion Museum as a long-term loan. The collection includes over eighty pairs from designers and fashion houses including Tokio Kumagaï, Prada, Azzedine Alaïa, Maison Martin Margiela, Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Salvatore Ferragamo, Balenciaga, Tabitha Simmons, and Jurgi Persoons, and is completed every season with new, unique pieces. This book is a tribute to these designers who inspired and stimulated Michiels and Bruloot throughout their careers as fashion designers. In more than 30 personal interviews, they allow us to discover their heroes.

My special thanks to Geert and Eddy for telling the story of this exciting journey in a book and exhibition entitled ‘Footprint. The Tracks of Shoes in Fashion’. The long-term loan from Bruloot and Michiels has a special place in our collection; it reflects the idiosyncratic choices of two passionate collectors.

I would also like to thank all those who buckled down to this project: Dodi Espinosa, Hettie Judah, Jelle Jespers, Frédéric Uyttenhove and the entire MoMu team, particularly Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Wim Mertens, Robby Timmermans, Danique Klijs, Dominika Łukoszek, Bérénice Brigou, Ellen Machiels, David Flamée, Birgit Ansoms, and Monica Ho. Kaat Debo Director MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp

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One of the first steps taken on the Moon, this is an image of Buzz Aldrin's bootprint from the Apollo 11 mission.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969.

STEPPING ON THE MOON 02:56 UTC, 21 JULY 1969

In the morning of 21 July 1969, my entire family was in front of the black and white television in great suspense to witness Neil Armstrong descend from the bottom step of the Apollo Lunar Module and so create the most iconic footprint of modern times.

As a 16-year-old boy, I experienced the moment as one in which science fiction became reality and the future turned limitless.

This “…giant leap for mankind” would stay burned in my memory as a sign that anything is possible, as long as you believe it to be so.

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Ann Demeulemeester, Autumn - W inter 1989 - 1990

The Foundations Laying the foundations for almost a century of fashion silhouettes, between them Roger Vivier and Salvatore Ferragamo dreamed up many of the shapes that roll in and out of vogue season after season, from platform soles to go-go boots, stiletto heels to pilgrim pumps.

Vivier and Ferragamo’s innovations were not just in the realms of style but also of engineering: Vivier is credited with developing the metal shaft in the heel of the shoe that permitted the creation of slim, high stiletto heels in the mid 1950s, while Ferragamo studied anatomy to understand the distribution of weight on the foot channelling his insight into beautiful shoes that would support the wearer.

Creating his first designs for Ossie Clark in the early 1970s, Manolo Blahnik reintroduced elegant, fantastical footwear into fashion, championing light, elevated shoes in an era dominated by weight and heft. Through collaborations with some of the most important designers of the last 45 years, and his own tireless creativity, Blahnik’s shoes have become synonymous with fashion.

Roger Vivier - Pamela Golbin

Salvatore Ferragamo -

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Mrs. Wanda Ferragamo

Manolo Blahnik

top left

Salvatore Ferragamo with Sofia Loren as she tries on a Tavarnelle lace model, 1955. She launched in Rome at the Club Open Gate the new Ferragamo’s invention: the sea-leopard skin. top right

I discovered that the weight of the body, when standing, drops vertically on the arches of the feet – as the plumb-line shows', wrote Ferragamo. bottom

Peggy Guggenheim wearing a Ferragamo model and seated on a 'Correalist Rocker'

by Frederick Kiesler, Surrealist Gallery, Art of This Century, New York c. 1942.

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Salvatore Ferragamo and designer Emilio Schuberth with models wearing Ferragamo's latest invention: the ‘Kimo’ sandal, variations on which were worn with Mr Shuberth's gowns at the first Italian fashion show in Florence, 1951. bottom left

Salvatore Ferragamo touching the feet of Princess Maria Pia di Savoia in Palazzo Spini Feroni, 1958. bottom right

Salvatore Ferragamo surrounded by the lasts created for his famous customers, 1955.

I first encountered Manolo Blahnik back in the late 1970s through his regular advertisements in Ritz Newspaper – a British answer to Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, edited by David Bailey and David Litchfield. I was then living in Ostend with my parents and so London and BBC’s Top of the Pops were part of my ordinary life. Blahnik’s inventive and visionary intervention in Ritz made me suddenly understand that shoes could be fashion: so much more than foot wear.

Some years later, Eddy and I discovered his store in Old Church Street off King’s Road, it was in a residential street with ivy covering the shop windows and a Pompeian interior.

The shoes were presented all over the store in a very refined, intimate display. This store, and the understanding of shoes as fashion formed the basis of our first steps as shoe retailers. We continue to admire Mr Blahnik as an ingenious shoe designer until this day, so it was a great moment to finally meet him for a full afternoon talking about shoes, fashion and people…

Geert Bruloot

MANOLO BLAHNIK Manolo Blahnik was born in Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands in 1942. Following work as a designer for theatre, Blahnik was encouraged to study footwear by Diana Vreeland, then editor of American Vogue. His first collection was launched in 1971: the following year his shoes were used for Ossie Clark’s catwalk show, the first in a long line of collaborations with fashion designers including John Galliano, and, most recently, Victoria Beckham.

Blahnik’s body-transforming footwear is often materially minimal – cut low at the front to show a flash of toe cleavage, and with barely-there sides and well-balanced slender heels – giving the appearance of an extended naked leg from the toes upward. A voracious consumer of cinema, as well as books on history, art and design, Mr Blahnik’s ability to create shoes with distinct personalities continues apace – the designer’s personal archive now stretches to some 20,000 pairs.

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Prada, Spring - Summer 2012

My first collection was a small collection – it was 1984 – and there were 20 outfits, no more. I presented the collection in my home in Milano. Immediately I was really lucky, because we sold the collection to the most important shops all around the world. So after that I decided to open on Corso Como. At the end of 1985, I started to do my little presentation in Corso Como. First I opened the first floor, which is the style office. And after one year, I opened the shop.

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Romeo Gigli, 2008 left

Kirsten Owen photographed

by Paolo Roversi for Romeo Gigli, Autumn-Winter 1988-1989 top right

'Ballet Shoe', watercolor and ink, 1990-1991 bottom right

Romeo Gigli, collection Teodora di Bisanzio, AutumnWinter 1989-1990

It was different for me to work in fashion. My father was an antiquarian book collector and I grew up studying to be the next antiquarian. My parents died when I was 18. I started to travel around the world. At that time, I used to collect everything: costumes, fabrics, art, craft. I used to go to the tailor when I was four or five years old and my mother was a really young woman wearing haute couture. So, I had this approach with my girlfriends: I tried to change their style all the time. Bring them something, this and that. And then in New York, Dimitri an Italian tailor asked me to work in fashion. I said ‘why not?’ I was living in New York for three months working with him on the collection.

He said to me, ‘oh, you are so able to work with fabrics, why don’t you do a few things for girls?’ Why not? And I started, as with my girlfriend, dressing the girls with the tight fabrics, mix it with ethnic jewels, flat shoes and all that.

I saw that this could be my work for the future, and now I decided to start in fashion. Studying for me means watching clothes, working clothes, studying books of designers: and when I felt comfortable, I start with my collection of

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1984. It was my vision; I never follow trends; I don’t like fashion magazines. I tried to project what it was, my imagination, the girls I would like to have met.

I worked with flat shoes for girls because I didn’t like the noise of heels at that time – my wife, she wears high heels now, and I did love her high heels after many years – and because I like to see girls the way men come into the room, not flying, but in silence. In this secret way, you know? For me, women, they are beautiful and they are a present for men. That was my vision. I don’t have the shoes anymore unfortunately, but, when I did the shows, I used to do 25-30 pairs of shoes, and I used to work with a girl wrapping them all. I remember when I did the first shoe collection it was Diego Della Valle doing my shoes. I got a telephone call from him and he said, ‘I cannot do that shoe, because we are doing shoes, not dresses’. My answer was, ‘Oh, Mr Della Valle, if you want I can come to your manufacturer and I will teach the patternmaker the way to do it’, and I did it, for everything. Like I do with my hands. And it was really successful.

There were stretch leather boots in one of my last collections, from 2000 or something. But they are the same: flat for a girl, and I did the last with my own hands. Because if you’re not doing it yourself with your hands, they don’t understand how to do it.

I had been traveling around Indonesia, India and China, and my first book of fashion was [Max] Tilke’s Costume Patterns and Designs, it’s a book about cos-

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GEERT BRULOOT

I think that in your career, music and cinema have played a very important part, right?

GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI

Music, yes. When I was a teenager, I was confused, like all teenagers. I was born in a suburban area, San Mauro Pascoli.

With the fog, the long winters in that place didn’t feel so good.

GB What

was a company for comfort shoes, very old. You know when some women pass away they used to buy new shoes because it’s good luck to have new shoes on board?

GB Sure?

GZ Yes,

this is the tradition – never old shoes – new shoes but very black, of course. Horrible, but the technique of the shoes is the same. If you produce a stiletto, sandal or a heavy loafer, the shoes, in terms of details, are the same: the difference is the pensiero (thought). I learned a lot of things because this company was very small and I was very young, like a mascot.

were your parents doing?

had an ice cream bar on the beach during the summertime: in the wintertime, a restaurant. I had three sisters, and the idea of my parents was to have all the family in one restaurant. My family was very traditional and I was like a UFO: I was different. Music saved me because when I listened to rock ‘n’ roll, or pop, for me it was like flying, far from reality. I started when I was seventeen or sixteen years old to DJ for the evening programme on the local radio. I was a radio DJ for seven years and I used to do some afternoon and night programmes. My speciality was Philadelphia music, like soul, or some rock ‘n’ roll, blues… My dad says, ‘Okay, you want to do this stupid work? You will be a loser’ if you are a DJ in that time…

GZ We

GB …You

GB They

they supported me. All these women, they taught me. I started to learn, slowly, the kinds of leather: capretto, different suede and calf, half-calf, and then the kangaroo and the exotics, snake, anaconda. The idea was to learn the old story, like having a time machine. With a time machine, you can go to the past, take all the know-how, and have one leg in the last centuries and one leg in the future. For me, it was important to learn, to understand the story from the past, and to translate the details to the new concept of futuristic shoes. After this experience I was ready to make some shoes and I founded a company.

The company was called High-Tech, and my brand Immaginare. Of course, without any money. I used to design shoes with the part of the wedge in aluminium, the other part of the wedge in Plexiglas, and then the pump in ideas coming from Memphis [Group designs], the ‘architettura futurista’ all the leather handmade, painted by me. I was the president of the company, the designer and the manufacturer and also the [sales person]. I sold zero pairs. I used to give my best friends a few pairs of shoes.

didn’t make money.

Mauro Pascoli, is a big [centre] of fashion in terms of manufacturing of clothing and shoes and I said, ‘around me there are a lot of nice, pretty girls with disgusting shoes. I will try to do some shoes maybe.’ I was born with a good hand, for design, you know? you draw well?

all the time. I draw everything. I started, probably at the end of the 1970s, to do some prototypes. Strange but very, very extreme. Okay, maybe this is my future and I changed my life.

GZ Yes,

GB You

‘Calzolaio’ – in Italy the way they translate ‘shoemaker’–, is very cheap. ‘Shoe designer’ doesn’t exist. It was a very bad time. A friend of mine saved me: he offered me the possibility to work with a French designer – Thierry Mugler. We designed some shoes, we realised some prototypes and a company close to Milan produced the shoes. I used to take a local train to Paris from my place, I’d buy the ticket one-way because I had no money, and then in Paris, with other friends we slept, probably, ten or eleven in one disgusting room in a hotel.

Back in Italy, I left San Mauro Pascoli. I did freelance work: advising on children’s shoes, men’s shoes,

could feel already a possibility there?

think not. In shoes, there are two worlds. When you design a shoe, it’s a treat, no? You think about shoes.

Then, the dark side of the moon, when you want to realise the shoes you thought about, and it’s another story. You need technical support and knowhow.

Without know-how, you cannot translate your idea. To understand the know-how, I asked to learn in a factory as an employee, to understand the whole process of production. I used to stitch the shoes. This company, it

GZ I

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liked you.

GZ Yes,

GZ San

GB Do

It’s the custom? Really?