As a follow-up to yesterday’s post I’m focusing today on Marc Jacobs shoes for the Autumn/Winter 2012-13 season.
To do it I’m going to summon up the dark and very knowledgeable forces of my friends Milo Bandini and Irma Vivaldi from the (bilingual - Italian/English) Paddock blog (remember them?).
They are indeed real footwear experts and, for the occasion, they are very kindly letting me pilfer some images and links from their mighty posts on Italian shoes and seminal Italian manufacturers.
So we know that Marc Jacobs' shoes for the next season are somehow inspired by pilgrims and puritans, we are therefore assuming that, before he designed them, he locked himself in a museum or a library and started looking at paintings/books with images such as Charles Lucey's "Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers".
Yet you don’t even need to go as far back as that to spot pilgrims' shoes in fashion, in fact you could just go back to 2006 with this "Tetvan" boot by Manolo Blahnik, inspired by the Pilgrim Fathers, a connection suggested to me by my Paddock friends, who also kindly sent me the image (from the book Scarpe! edited by Ilaria Danieli and Rosa Chiesa, Rizzoli 2010).
Wait, wait, did we say Manolo Blahnik? Yes, we did. But Blahnik actually has a strong connection with Italy and in particular with Vigevano where the company that produces the designer's creations is based, so let’s move to Italy to discover further pieces of our pilgrims' puzzle.
In yesterday’s post I mentioned how the high-tongued buckled shoes or similar versions of these shoes were actually fashionable in Italy in the '70s.
Some of the earliest models actually arrived on the Italian market in 1968. Check out these shoes by Parabiago-based Rancir marked as the next big thing, "the fabulous shoes worn by Rome's young people".
The following year, 1969, was another great year for buckled and high-tongued shoes: this is an example by another Parabiago-based company, Colette (you can discover its history here).
In this case the shoes look rather elegant (maybe more Vivier in Belle de Jour than Pilgrim Fathers, even though in this case they have an oval buckle), but you can check out further designs by Colette in this post.
Buckled and high-tongued shoes continued to be popular at the end of the '60s as this post illustrates with further examples by Zorzi.
As the '70s approached, it was more buckle galore, with Otello Bertocco (one of the most original Italian designers between the '60s and the '70s) winning a prestigious award in 1971 in Turin with the "Elyse" model.
A year earlier the Calzaturificio di Varese (check out the original post regarding it here) came up with an ostrich tasselled moccasin with no buckle, but with a similar heel to Jacobs', that I'm juxtaposing here to a buckled and checkered shoe by Molaschi (1970) that could be seen as the more elegant evolution of the original "Pilgrim Fathers' shoes".
My friends at Paddock - who have been on the lookout for me for further Marc Jacobs-like shoes in their own archives - also sourced for me the following designs by Charles Jourdan for Dior (source: the Musée International de la Chaussure).
The shoes come from the 1969-70 (left) and the 1970 collections (right) and they betray a sort of royal court derivation (think Louis XV). For their colours and rhinestone embellishments, they are probably the most similar to Marc Jacobs’s Autumn/Winter 2012-13 shoes.
So fancy the Marc Jacobs shoes for the next season, but worried about the effects they may have on your bank account? Fear not: with a little bit of luck, you'll be able to find your beloved Pilgrim Fathers' shoes in a well-stocked vintage market, though, now that I think about it, some lucky Italian/French fashionistas probably still have them hidden away in a forgotten corner of their houses, attics or garages.
All archival images courtesy of the Paddock team.
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