In Italian footwear terms, having the keys to the Salvatore Ferragamo archive is close to owning the crown jewels. There’s a Ferragamo museum in Florence, which is now the creative director Paul Andrew’s playground for research. “He bequeathed 15,000 shoes,” he said, pointing out everything that had inspired the sequence of sculptural soles and woven uppers which were paraded for both women and men in today’s runway show. Each look of the coed women’s and men’s collections had a different variant of the house techniques; descendants of the cork and wood platforms, wedges, and the raffia-weaving skills that Ferragamo Moderne heels turned into shoe glamour for ’30s and ’40s movies stars.
Today, the shoes are showcased in the full ready-to-wear collections. Andrew designed the women’s, and Guillaume Meilland designed the men’s. There were handkerchief-hem skirts and dresses on the women’s side, and wide, fluid trouser silhouettes for men. A lot of beige-through-khaki prevailed; papery utilitarian-luxe fabrications suitable for the traveling businessperson. The model casting—Stella Tennant, Georgina Grenville, Saskia de Brauw—signaled “grown-up.”
It’s a pity that the face-on, full-length nature of runway shots here doesn’t focus attention on the design features that really mattered: i.e., the shoe action, seen in profile. Andrew’s thong-topped, cork-soled wedges and wooden platforms featured cutaway shapes inspired, he said, by Brâncusi sculptures. There were woven knee boots in pliable leather. Especially good: his reinterpretation of a chic fabric sandal prototype Ferragamo never sold. Pieced in triangles of soft, draped leather gathered onto the top of the foot—low, vertically stacked cylindrical heels enhanced its silhouette. You could see where it came from, historically, but also how far it could go as an elegantly comfortable house signature for next summer—and maybe, beyond.
