A 90-year-old archive + the brand’s first footwear creative director = reinvented icons.
In today’s fast-changing times, it doesn’t matter how rich your fashion archive is. What does: what you do with it to make it desirable now, and for the future.
To do that successfully, you sometimes need an outsider’s fresh eyes.
In Ferragamo’s case, that different perspective has come from New Yorkbased British designer Paul Andrew, whom the Italian brand appointed as its first footwear creative director.
Andrew, 38, studied at the Berkshire College of Art and Design in Britain in 1999. By 2013, after gigs at McQueen and Donna Karan, he had created his eponymous shoe label (with daring and practical styles), which charmed Anna Wintour and Diane von Furstenberg enough to win the 2014 CFDA/ Vogue Fashion Fund, the industry’s version of an Oscar.
For his first POV, which debuts this month, he reimagined elements of Ferragamo’s most iconic shoes into new styles: the 1939 Column Heel, once a closed-toe shoe with a gold leather heel, is now a sandal with a metal column heel (pictured above) that’s galvanised, so it won’t tarnish regardless of the weather; the 1947 F-shaped heel, patented for its concave wedge, is now a pump with the definitive heel in a very sought-after 2017 shade of rose (top); and Marlia, which could be inspired by the brand’s Vara, is a bow pump with a contemporary spin – its bow is fraye.
