It is no secret that sales of accessories - and shoes in particular - are generally higher than clothes, even in times of crisis. Yet, at the moment there seems to be a tremendous interest in footwear also for what regards exhibitions and events.
For example, the shopping centre The Village at Westfield, London, recently launched the exhibition "My Favourite Shoe" (until 29th September 2013).
Designed in collaboration with the Northampton Museums and Art Gallery, the exhibition looks at how vintage shoes inspire and influence contemporary designers, trying to find correspondences between old and new looks by shoe designers working in UK such as Atalanta Weller, Camilla Skovgaard, Joanne Stoker, Mr. Hare and Sophie Cox.
Art collectors with an interest in shoes may also be happy to hear that Christie's auction house is launching an online-only auction to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (until 22nd September) that includes 120 art pieces, from prints to photographs and drawings, revolving around the New York fashion scene. One of the pictures in the auction is entitled "Shoes" (1977) and shows a woman and a man's feet in white and red stilettos.
Another reason of joy for shoe fans is Jane Gershon Weitzman's volume Art and Sole (HarperCollins). The wife of shoe designer Stuart Weitzman collects in this volume the original, unusual, bizarre and fantastic shoes commissioned to various artists that appeared in the Stuart Weitzman windows since the store opened in 1996.
Shoes will still be trendy come next Spring, as fashion designer Mary Katrantzou proved during London Fashion Week. Her Spring/Summer 2014 collection is indeed entirely based on shoes, with prints of numerous examples of footwear appearing on all her dresses.
Her catwalk show opened with daywear designs featuring enlarged prints of classic man's brogues in maroon leather, their punched details, buckles and lacing perfectly reprinted on the bustier dresses, jackets, shorts and pleated skirts.
The next section was dedicated to sporty looks with the vinyl elements of modern high-tech sneakers recreated in neoprene and Velcro straps arching across the body and sensually hugging it with intricate trompe l’oeil effects.
This was actually the most confusing and chaotic part of the collection, with body-con dresses for modern amazons with qipao-like fastenings, that seemed to reference dynamic sports such as scuba diving and race-driving.
The evening looks were instead inspired by Marie Antoinette and her collection of mules. For the occasion Katrantzou got archival pieces out of the embroidery house of Lesage, scanned and blew them up, printed them on fabric and then embroidered them creating optical illusions through three-dimensional effects, or oversized ruffles on dresses with a lampshade-silhouette.
Though interesting, the collection - accompanied by shoes designed by Gianvito Rossi - was a bit too literal when it came to some looks (shoe fringe kilts turned into proper kilts? hmmm, not sure about it). Gigantic laces and oversized brogues created at times rather surreal effects, emphasising the fact that shoes are desirable when you wear them on your feet and not on your body. Shoes are indeed about empowering and domination when you walk in them and not when they walk over you (unless you're a shoe fetishist and you like that feeling - maybe; yet I doubt the shoe fetishist in Geoff Nicholson's novel Footsucker would like this collection...).
While blouses and T-shirts with small drawings and prints of shoes are not unusual (Ferragamo has lines of scarfs, shirts and jewellery featuring the most iconic footwear created by Salvatore), hyper-real photo prints of sneakers and laces may be a bit too much, even for the enthusiastic modern Cinderellas out there à la Anna Dello Russo, a well-known Katrantzou fan.
As for Katrantzou, she may be the queen of digital prints, but having mastered a technique that has become too widespread in the last two years allowing even amateurs to play with it and create perfect hyper-real and alternative fashion worlds, the time has come to start focusing on silhouettes rather than on colour-saturated prints and patterns. After all, while the dresses made in collaboration with the house of Lesage may be works of art, they all look more or less the same like rococo romantic baby-dolls, reason enough for Katrantzou's critics to start wondering where is her real talent.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments