Visiting a fashion archive can lead you to wonderful discoveries. If, while spending some time in an archive you also have the privilege of being introduced to the workers behind a specific brand or a company, you can then deem yourself also extremely lucky.
I recently visited the archives and workshop of a small artisanal footwear company based in Rome, Dal Co'. The current owner of the brand, Silvia Petrucci Dal Co' (who was so crazy to lend me some pieces from her collections for previous exhibitions I curated and co-curated...), kindly let me rummage through their pictures, newspaper articles, lasts and, well, memories in general.
In the end I didn't find Diana Vreeland's lasts as I hoped to (see yesterday's post...), though I found the lasts for Queen Sirikit of Thailand together with something else - artisans at work.
In our age of jobless desperation, labour chaos and social confusion, seeing people working and seeing artisans applying their skills to a form of art - shoe making - often considered as pretty redundant, is probably pretty rare.
Apart from owning a shop in Rome's city centre where you can order bespoke shoes, Dal Co' still has its own workshop. Both will soon be going through some much needed revamping, though, so this was the last chance I had to see things as they are at the moment.
As you may guess many things have changed between the very first workshop the company had (see first picture in this post) and the current one, but the modus operandi remains the same: the customer turns up at the shop, chooses the design, gets her feet measured, the artisans get down to work and the fittings follow until the shoes are finished.
The best thing about this experience was spending a few minutes with some of the artisans working on some of the current orders. The first thing I learnt from them is that it doesn't really take that long to make a pair of shoes and in 4 days (fittings included) you can have your bespoke footwear ready (it can take up to 10 days when there are various orders to attend to...).
The artisans in these pictures - Emilio, Franco and Patrizia - explained me that each of them has their own function, from pattern maker to cobbler, edger and shoemaker. Yet, despite having different roles, all of them emphasised two main points: you must have a great passion for this job and, sadly, there aren't too many young people interested in their professions.
Talking about passion, Patrizia told me that, as a child, she pulled apart a pair of First Communion shoes because she was obsessed about their structure, in a nutshell, she just wanted to see how they were made. Unfortunately she then incurred in the rage of her parents who were hoping to pass the shoes onto another member of the family, but at least she understood from a very early age what she would have liked to do as a grown up.
Her story also made me think about the Italian tradition being founded not on fast trends and fast shopping sprees, but on quality and on renewing old garments and accessories as well, a point highlighted in the following video also by Mr Antonio Di Majo, who used to work at Dal Co' as a cobbler.
There are further interesting facts that I discovered about the company and that I didn't know: Dal Co' made shoes for various fashion designers, among them Carosa, Valentino and Lancetti, but also collaborated with foreign fashion designers such as the long forgotten Sybil Connolly.
The Rome-based company created for example all the shoes for the Irish designer's Spring/Summer 1956 collection (a dinner dress from this specific collection, the “Butterscotch” dress in honey brown fabric and with a “monks' line”, reappeared this year on the BAFTA red carpet donned by Gillian Anderson - View this photo).
One of the most advanced designs ever made by Dal Co' is a rare example of heel-less shoe (as you may remember, André Perugia did some experiments with heel-less shoes already in the late '30s). Reintroduced on the market roughly four years ago, the heel-less shoe appeared in Marc Jacobs' collections as a reversed heel shoe (2008) and as fetish boots in Antonio Berardi's (2008) and Olivier Theyskens for Nina Ricci's collections (Autumn 2009), not to mention the more extreme alien monster-like models by Noritaka Tatehana or the metallic/glittery versions by Natacha Marro, favoured by Lady Gaga and Daphne Guinness.
The latest version of the heel-less shoe - from Jean-Paul Gaultier's Spring/Summer 2012 collection - is actually the most similar for its sole structure to the less extreme and more wearable version of the original heel-less shoe Dal Co' designed roughly 60 years ago. A case of copyright infringement or just the perfect demonstration that fashion works in circles and that what was fashionable decades ago is bound to come back into style at some point?
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