Walking Dreams: Salvatore Ferragamo 1898-1960 Book

Walking Dreams explores the life and work of the legendary Italian shoe designer, an artist who revolutionized footwear by introducing new styles and innovative materials that called up associations with furniture, domestic objects and radical architecture. Ferragamo?s work was always experimental, from cork wedges made from Italian wine-stoppers to stiletto heels, both of which he invented, to towering platforms in pressed and rounded layers, sometimes sculpted or painted, sometimes decorated with gems or shockingly tiny mirror mosaics. Over the years, Ferragamo patented systems for making leather substitutes, systems for producing raffia or jersey uppers, heels made of transparent bakelite, and wooden soles held together with traditional joinery.

Walking Dreams includes texts on the historical, artistic, social and erotic elements of Ferragamo?s work, as well as 80 mind-boggling portraits of his most radical and influential pieces, all of which were selected from the archive of 10,000 shoes at the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence. Each of the 80 shoe models is accompanied by an individual history. Includes a brief chronology of the life of the designer.

Salvatore Ferragamo was born in 1898 in the small town of Bonito, Italy, the eleventh of 14 children. He made his first pair of shoes at the age of nine, when his parents, poor farmers, couldn't afford to buy shoes for his sisters? first communion: faced with the shame of seeing them wear clogs to church, Ferragamo borrowed materials from the local cobbler and made the shoes himself. At the age of 14, after studying shoemaking in nearby Naples, he opened a shop in his parents? home, supervising six assistants as they hand-sewed his designs. By 1914, four of his brothers had moved to America, and one of them had found work making cowboy boots in a Boston shoe factory. Ferragamo followed suit, but rejected the production-line philosophy, believing that every pair of shoes should be studied and researched, and convinced his brothers to move to California. There, he opened a shop for repairs and made-to-measure shoes, which soon became famous among the Hollywood elite, including Rita Hayworth, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner, Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and Bette Davis. In 1927 he returned to Florence and began to fashion shoes for the wealthiest and most powerful women of the century, from the Maharani of Cooch Behar to Eva Peron to Marilyn Monroe. He died in 1960 at the age of 62.