Women from the Ankle Down

The Story of Shoes and How They Define Us

Rachelle Bergstein

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780061969683
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062097071
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Rachelle Bergstein brings readers along on a unique and delightful romp through the history of shoes, the women who wear them, and the profound impact they have on our lives.

Women from the Ankle Down includes interviews and cameos with influential figures ranging from Lisa Mayock of Vena Cava to Oscar Award–winning costume designer Patrizia van Brandenstein, from Doc Martens historian Martin Roach to Fashion Institute of Technology museum director Valerie Steele; from Marilyn Monroe and Jane Fonda to Salvador Ferragamo and Christian Dior; from Judy Garland to Wonder Woman.

1
Ferragamo and the Wartime Wedge

(1900–1938)

Ferragamo wedge, 1935 or 1936

1907: Bonito, Italy

Bonito was a small village about one hundred kilometers (60 miles) east of Naples that ended in a cul-de-sac and had just one road going in and out. It was home to 4,500 residents—mostly poor farmers, tradesmen, and a few gentry—including the large Ferragamo family, who farmed their ten-acre property and sold all of the crops that they did not consume themselves. They lived across the street from a small church as well as the town cobbler’s modest shop. Salvatore Ferragamo, then nine years old, most afternoons could be found perched on a chair outside the window, watching intently as Luigi Festa slid his hands over tanned leather skins; then he’d painstakingly cut a pattern, shaping it around a wooden foot-shaped last* and stitch the pieces together, careful to keep his actions precise. As Salvatore followed each step, his heart beating and his toes flexing, the practice of shoemaking echoed deeply inside him, as if he had learned it already in a previous life.

Making shoes was considered low-class work even by a poor family, and Salvatore, the eleventh of fourteen Ferragamo children, knew he was expected to earn his keep. He told his father what he wanted to do. But much to his disappointment, his father admonished him: No, Salvatore, shoemaking isn’t for respectable people. So Salvatore dutifully apprenticed with a tailor, then a barber, then a carpenter—but at each job, he showed little interest or aptitude. One Saturday evening, his mother, Mariantonia, rushed home in a panic. She needed two pairs of white shoes for her six-year-old daughter’s First Holy Communion the next day, one pair for Giuseppina and another for the elder Rosina, who would serve as her attendant. Normally, hand-me-downs would have sufficed, but the Ferragamo girls had used and reused their white shoes so many times that they were too worn out to wear to church. All day Mariantonia had knocked on her neighbors’ doors, looking for shoes to borrow, but many of the townsfolk had Communion-aged girls of their own and nothing on hand to lend. Mariantonia cried over dinner, grappling with the shame of sending her daughter to receive the Eucharist in shabby shoes or worse, dark ones that would stand out amid the line of girls dressed all in white.

Without saying a word, Salvatore scurried to Festa’s shop and asked the cobbler for a length of inexpensive white canvas, two child-size lasts, and tools, and then hid them in the nine-room, three-story house until everyone in his family was finally asleep. He tiptoed back downstairs and carefully laid everything out on a bench, imitating Festa. A sense of anticipation rushed over him: without hesitation, he let his hands, and instincts, take over. Somehow, Salvatore knew how to make shoes, and as he handled the materials that trustworthy part of him—the reliable inner compass that had pointed him toward his vocation—vibrated.

The next morning, Mariantonia woke up to find four small pairs of pristine white shoes, and on the church steps, she gushed over her young son. By nightfall, his father had no choice but to relent: to Salvatore’s delight, he gave him permission to go to work for Luigi Festa.

Ferragamo was thrilled, but Festa, whom he had so long admired, wanted first to use him as a babysitter for his two children, and then, when Salvatore resisted, he let his young helper rush to fill orders while he smoked, played cards, and drank wine with his friends. Two years later, Salvatore’s father suddenly died from an infection that settled in after a routine operation. Only eleven, Salvatore announced to his mother that he would leave their village and go to Naples, where he could further study his craft. Mariantonia initially balked, but soon Salvatore was on his way west to the coast with five lire in his pocket. Once there, he immediately sought out one of the most successful shoemakers in Naples and asked for a job. After just two weeks, Salvatore had learned so much more about shoemaking than he had with Festa, but when he requested his wages, the cobbler pointed to mistakes he had made while practicing and refused to pay. Even at this young age, Salvatore could not abide this kind of injustice and the next morning walked to the nearby town of Cervinara where his uncle Alessandro lived. His request was simple: would his uncle loan him twenty lire to open his own shop back home in Bonito?

What Ferragamo didn’t appreciate was that even Milan was hardly a fashion—let alone a footwear—capital yet. That title belonged only to New York and Paris, and the two cities competed like haughty grande dames, with the City of Light fighting to maintain its reign as the premier purveyor of covetable couture. Shoe styles and colors were limited—the dominant palette was black, brown, and white—and emphasized propriety: a woman might wear low-heeled pumps with tongues to cover the tops of her feet outdoors, semiandrogynous spectators and oxfords, or buttoned or lace-up Edwardian boots, which squeezed the foot like a corset to emphasize narrowness. Slip-ons with embroidery or beading were appropriate only for the boudoir: a strictly observed rule. Poor families bought handmade shoes that were expected to weather a lifetime, and the notion of choosing particular shoes to match an occasion, mood, or outfit was the purview of only the most privileged citizens. Skirts lingered well below the ankle anyway, so a woman looking to compete with her neighbor’s shoes might only catch a glimpse of toe, or at most, a tightly laced vamp,* before her dress obstructed her view.

Yet women’s manners and interests in both cities were slowly shifting. At the turn of the century in Paris, when young ladies began bicycling and playing other sports, hemlines rose to allow greater freedom of movement. In response, shoemakers created taller boots to protect the stockings from errant spokes and mud. Feeling liberated, some women even swapped skirts for loose-fitting pants called bloomers—still, if a woman was caught in bloomers and not in the company of her bicycle, then she very likely would be sent home to change. More than a decade later, when the economic pressures of World War I caused hemlines to hike up higher still—shorter skirts required less fabric—shoemakers again followed suit, with boots that reached farther and farther up the leg, until practicality prevailed upon the fashion elite to permit everyday women to show a short length of exposed stocking.

As World War I spread throughout Europe and crippled its economic progress, the United States led in adapting to mass production. In the case of shoes, cobbling went from an artisanal craft to a booming and competitive industry. Now, with scantier skirts that automatically raised awareness of what a woman wore on her feet by putting them on display, women could afford to own more of these less expensive shoes manufactured by machines rather than by skilled laborers. Companies were suddenly able to turn out different colors and styles seasonally, display and sell them in department stores, and women could shop and experience instant gratification, rather than wait for a cobbler to fill an order. The fashion magazine, unlike its predecessor the fashion journal, relied on income from advertisers instead of just reader subscriptions, giving burgeoning shoe companies the chance to brand themselves. The result: the female consumer circa 1918 no longer had to trust the advice of her (usually) stooped local shoemaker but rather could spot a style she liked in a fashion editorial, or on another woman walking down the street, and then go straight to the store and buy it. For the first time, she might even take her cues from the movies; the nascent film industry cultivated comely stars and projected its fashion plates on ten-foot-high screens. America, with its increasing prevalence of cars, movie theaters, and household radios, inspired an incipient consumer culture, and women, whether at home or employed, were courted aggressively.

But back in Bonito in 1912, the world had not yet changed, and the role of the shoemaker remained secure. With Uncle Alessandro’s twenty lire in hand, Salvatore took over a small, windowless space in his mother’s house, between the village’s main street and the family’s kitchen. The quality of his work quickly overcame the limitations of his humble storefront as word spread across the village about Mariantonia Ferragamo’s enterprising fourteen-year-old son and his beautiful, well-made shoes. He began to attract customers from outside Bonito as well, and soon Salvatore was running a successful business with six assistants and a loyal base of well-off clients. Working dawn to dusk and making twenty to twenty-five pairs per week, Salvatore was able to pay back his uncle and even to start saving for the future. Then his older brother Alfonso visited Italy from his new home in America, bringing news.

Alfonso admired the craftsmanship of Salvatore’s shoes and had become something of an expert himself: in Boston, he had taken a job at the Queen Quality Shoe Company. But when he learned the meager price his younger brother’s creations commanded, he advised him: “Why do you waste your time working here in Bonito? Here you make a pair of shoes and get so little for them. In America, a pair of custom-made shoes would pay you much more if you cared to work that way, though as a matter of fact in America nobody works by hand anymore.” Alfonso described the factories where soles could be stitched to uppers, and heels were composed by stacking layer upon layer of leather—all in a matter of minutes. The machines did all the work, completing tasks that would take a solitary cobbler hours or even days bent over the table, his eyes strained against dwindling daylight. Salvatore listened, aghast. He grasped that as long as he stayed in Bonito, the scope of his success would be narrow, but machine-made shoes? He wasn’t interested. The very idea was a travesty: an insult to the craft that he considered a pillar of his soul. As Alfonso packed his bags to return to Boston, he tried again to coax his younger brother, but Salvatore refused to listen. He was happy in his small corner of the world, he insisted, with his old-fashioned tools and custom designs.

Alfonso didn’t let up. He returned to America and wrote letters about how happy Salvatore could be living with him and two of their other brothers, who had also resettled across the ocean. It didn’t take long to change Salvatore’s mind; his innate ambition was tempted by Alfonso’s words even as he tried to convince himself he was satisfied living in Bonito. Once again, he packed his suitcase and headed west to Naples, this time to the port, where he’d board a cramped ship in a third-class cabin, headed for New York. Just before the SS Stampalia pulled away from the dock, Salvatore purchased a gabardine coat with a fur collar, so that he wouldn’t be mistaken for “a provincial” in his new country. His eyes were focused firmly on the future, not the past; when he arrived in New York harbor without as much as a rudimentary grasp of English, he took in the tall buildings, the looming metal structures, and knew instantly that he belonged.

A few months earlier, Alfonso, Girolamo, and Secondino had left Boston for Santa Barbara, California, but after a train ride from New York to Massachusetts, Salvatore was greeted by his sisters and his brother-in-law who, like Alfonso had, worked for the Queen Quality Shoe Company. Just two days later, he arranged to give Salvatore a tour of the factory, where he was promised he could pick his favorite section and begin a job there right away. Appreciative, and eager to explore the mysterious world of machine-made shoes, Salvatore entered and then watched in horror as pairs in every state of semifabrication sputtered down the assembly line: “This was an inferno, a bedlam of rattles and clatters and whizzing machines and hurrying, scurrying people. I stood dazed; I walked about dazed, watching the thousands of pieces of shoes going in at one end of the assembly line and pouring out at the other on endless belts, rows upon rows of finished shoes, hundreds of them, thousands of them.” Even as he could admit that the products were decently constructed, he also understood that the factory had leached every bit of artistry out of the process, treating shoes as no different from the tools that were used to make them. Feeling miserable, he refused a job, at the risk of insulting his brother-in-law. Still, Salvatore trusted his gut; he listened to that internal voice that told him he could be successful making handmade footwear, even at a moment when snorting American machines were poised to replace him.

He wrote Alfonso in Santa Barbara, who was excited about the prospect of the younger Ferragamo brother joining them out west. California, with its hot desert air and spiny palm trees, was an attractive place to settle, especially because the United States government had offered free land to anyone who was willing to cultivate it. California was also the seat of the burgeoning film industry, where pioneering directors like Cecil B. DeMille were staging full-scale westerns filled with brave cowboys and savage Indians, which were hugely popular with audiences. When Salvatore arrived, the older Ferragamo brothers were only slightly annoyed by his refusal to adapt to the realities of modern shoemaking, and ultimately, they accommodated him, agreeing to pool their money and open a small Santa Barbara shoe repair shop. They found a two-room storefront at 1033 State Street; there, they could bring in money by fixing broken and worn-out shoes, and the now sixteen-year-old Salvatore—the only talented designer of the bunch—could make new ones for the studios, specializing in pairs of comfortable, attractive, and period-appropriate cowboy boots. In 1914 the shop opened its doors and almost immediately proved to be lucrative, as Salvatore filled a gap in Hollywood and won the right people over; “the West would have been conquered earlier if they had had boots like these,” DeMille remarked when he saw his work.

Surrounded by his family and creatively satisfied, Salvatore grew into a dapper, caramel-skinned artist with Bogart-esque rugged good looks, and spoke English with a thick Italian accent that charmed his patrons. In just seven short years, he had come so far from Luigi Festa’s village shop, but ever since he was a little boy, one aspect of the craft had nagged him. In order to create a custom shoe, the cobbler takes a series of measurements from the client’s foot, and then cuts, shapes, and stitches according to the numbers. Salvatore had learned the particulars from Festa and then again from the best shoemaker in Naples, yet some of his customers still complained that their feet hurt, which led him to wonder if the practice itself was flawed; perhaps there was some gap in his knowledge of the body that was getting in the way. He recognized that shoes served a very specific function and thus needed to be comfortable; he also believed, with every fiber of his being, that a woman needn’t sacrifice beauty or glamour in order to be kind to her feet. That said, having catered to women in both Italy and America, he had seen firsthand the kind of damage ill-fitting shoes could do—so many older signori sought him out, requesting custom work to relieve pressure on their blunt little hammer toes, their sadly fallen arches, their stubborn corns, and irreversible bunions, looking for respite from chronic pain and discomfort. Many women blamed their genes, but Salvatore suspected otherwise. He swore that he would never inflict this kind of harm, and just to be sure, he enrolled at the University of Southern California to study anatomy.

While a student, Salvatore was able to use his shop like a laboratory, testing his theories about the foot, weight distribution, and the graceful human skeleton. A period of trial and error, during which some women sang his praises while others criticized him, left him frustrated, and his brothers urged him to give up the quest for perfection. But eventually he was rewarded for his single-mindedness with a breakthrough. He—along with everyone else—was making shoes wrong. It was indisputable. Except now, he was the only one who knew how to fix it.

Like his mentors, Salvatore had been laboring under the false impression that the foot should be measured while flat. This led to shoes that supported the ball and the heel—which seemed to make sense, given that the arch never touches the ground. But what Salvatore realized—to his utter astonishment—was that walking barefoot, and walking in shoes, are physically two different functions. In other words: shoes change the way we walk. Thrilled by this revelation, Salvatore remodeled his lasts and tossed out the others that couldn’t be altered. The secret, he realized, was arch support. Suddenly women were telling him that he had made them the most comfortable shoes they’d ever worn in their lives.

Soon after Salvatore graduated from USC, the city of Santa Barbara changed its tax rates, chasing the film industry a hundred miles south to Hollywood. The business that had been the Ferragamos’ bread and butter disappeared. Salvatore tried commuting to Los Angeles, but the travel exhausted him, and he told his brothers he wanted to move the shop. They resisted, arguing that the repair jobs would keep the business afloat and relocating would mean starting from scratch with an entirely new clientele. For months, the brothers argued until Salvatore packed a car himself and in 1923 opened the Hollywood Boot Shop on the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas boulevards. The film industry kept him busy; he filled commissions for epic movies like The Ten Commandments and delighted in the range of delicate Greco-Roman sandals he was asked to create. But the store also became a destination spot for cinema starlets, for whom the exotic and charming shoemaker would gladly design one-of-a-kind shoes, stretching the boundaries of his imagination for a class of women who all wanted to look cutting-edge and stand out from their fellow actresses. Before long, Ferragamo had satisfied his dream of opening a bustling shoe store that mixed art, podiatric science, and commerce—without the help of factories.

Outside of the worlds of footwear and film, women’s roles had very recently changed, and it had only a little bit to do with industrialization. Women wanted to gain a stronger position within their households, but more than anything, they wanted to get outside and vote: to ensure that their voices had the same legal weight, breadth, and value as men’s. While Ferragamo studied the foot, the suffragettes campaigned tirelessly, pounding the pavement in ornamented wide-brim hats, blouses with puffed sleeves, long, trim-waisted skirts, and medium-heeled boots—albeit ones that didn’t, like the buttoned and laced-up designs still in fashion, pinch the foot into submission. Deliberately, they kept their appearances feminine, anticipating the criticism that by demanding rights they were trying to supplant their husbands. This was the first time American women, as a community, had mobilized, and they celebrated in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote, was ratified. Amid this triumph, the country’s perspective was shifting; 1920 census data revealed that more than half of the country’s population, roughly fifty-four million people, lived in cities, rather than in rural communities—meaning that in the United States, tight-knit villages like Bonito, along with their small-town values, were disappearing. The census produced another surprising statistic: two-thirds of the population was thirty-five or younger, with the median age set at a jejune twenty-five, which meant that overarching values were in flux and being reshaped by a youthful, more sophisticated majority with unprecedented access to one another and the world around them.

Just after the suffragettes won the vote, flappers and jazz babies caused fathers to whip out their shotguns as they danced...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Ferragamo and the Wartime Wedge (1900–1938)
• 2. MGM, the Great Depression, and Pulling Yourself Up by Your Ruby Slippers (1936–1939)
• 3. Back to the Drawing Board (1937–1943)
• 4. The Femme Fatale and the Original Power Pump (1944–1948)
• 5. The Stiletto (1950–1954)
• 6. The Feminine Balancing Act (1953–1959)
• 7. Flats, or Some Like It Not (1957–1959)
• 8. From Dolly Birds to Birkenstocks (1961–1966)
• 9. These Boots Are Made for the Valkyrie (1965–1969)
• 10. Props, Platforms, and Porno (1970–1974)
• 11. The Lord of the Gender-Bending Dance (1977–1979)
• 12. Manolo, Molloy, and the New Power Shoes (1975–1982)
• 13. The Workout Is Not a Spectator Sport (1982–1988)
• 14. The Cool Kid Trinity: Vans, Chuck Taylors, and Doc Martens (1982–1994)
• 15. Girl Power and Mary Janes (1994–1999)
• 16. Shoes and the Single Girl (1998–2008)
• 17. The Search for Ruby Slippers (2000–present)
• Author’s Note
• New from the author of Women from the Ankle Down
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher