Wynn Las Vegas Magazine by MODERN LUXURY

Wynn Las Vegas - 2016 - Issue 1 - Spring+Summer

Wynn Magazine - Las Vegas

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50 photography by alessia pierdomenico/bloomberg via get t y images (shoes); Fratelli alinari/alinari archives, Florence/alinari via get t y images (craFtsmen) replaced on the building's façade by a new crest, featuring a suit of armor carrying Gucci handbags. In 2015, Gucci promoted a relatively unknown 43-year-old associ- ate designer named Alessandro Michele to creative director, and he has embraced the sense of elegance-meets-fun that defines Florentine fashion. Michele has brought back the floral prints and swishy fabrics once beloved by Princess Grace. His exciting new designs mix Art Nouveau details, 1920s flapper style, hippie peasant dresses, and the smart lines of mid-20th-century fashion. And he has returned the brand's famous interlocking G's to pride of place in its roster of pattern and clasp designs. While the Gucci Museo also has—naturally—a small shop on-site, the com- pany's primary Florence boutique is on Via de' Tornabuoni, the main artery of the city's shopping district. Anchoring the base of this boulevard, a block south of Gucci, is the mighty 13th-century Palazzo Spini Feroni, its castlelike battlements profiled against the sky. A luxurious hotel in the 19th century, the palazzo became the seat of the municipality of Florence during its brief 1860s reign as capital of the new Kingdom of Italy. In the 1930s, a cobbler named Salvatore Ferragamo purchased the building, filling its frescoed halls with craft workshops, fashion ateliers, and offices for what was by then already a footwear empire. Ferragamo had made his first shoes—for his sisters' confirmations—at the age of 9. He was apprenticed to a cobbler in Naples at 11, and by 13 he had opened his first shoe shop. Three years later, in 1914, he emigrated to America to join his brother on a shoe and boot assembly line outside Boston. Impressed by the industrial techniques he saw but devoted to old-world craftsmanship, Craftsmen at work in the studio of footwear designer and manufacturer Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence's Palazzo Feroni circa 1937. above: Vara shoes, by Salvatore Ferragamo SpA, on display at the company's museum in Florence.

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