Wynn Magazine - Las Vegas
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/660157
Ferragamo soon decamped to Southern California to forge his own alchemy of modern methods and the traditional cobbler's art. By 1923, LA newspapers were calling him the "shoemaker to the stars" for a client list that included nearly every screen goddess of the early 20th century: Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Mary Pickford, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn. Ferragamo succeeded not just because he crafted flawlessly elegant, occasionally outrageous confections and slipped them onto famous feet to grace Hollywood's red carpets. He emphasized comfort as much as style, taking anatomy and mathematics classes at the University of Southern California to puzzle out how to distribute body weight over the arch of the human foot. His research allowed his artisans to mass- produce shoes that retained the elements of a made-to-measure fit. Today the brand still offers more than 70 fit and size combinations. Ferragamo returned to Italy in 1926, settling in the emerging fashion capital of Florence, where he eventually turned the Palazzo Spini Feroni into not only his brand's global headquarters, but also a museum displaying shoes made for his celebrated clients. (His firm continues its Hollywood association, especially in period films, pro- viding footwear for Madonna in Evita and Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, for example.) Like his Florence neighbors Gucci and Pucci, Ferragamo and the house he founded gained worldwide fame without losing sight of the important role that Italian artisanal traditions played in his success. He likely could not have anticipated that he and his contemporaries would come to epitomize the luxury that people flock to Las Vegas and Macau to experience at Wynn. He wrote in his autobiography, "All over Italy— even today, and in the cities as well as the poor villages—you will see cobblers sitting in their tiny stone rooms, surrounded by heaps of shoes all higgledy-piggledy, working crouched over their lasts under the beam from a naked electric-light bulb." That was written half a century ago, but wander the side streets of the Oltrarno neighborhood today and you can still glimpse that very scene through the open windows of 21st- century Florentine craftsmen. Wander the Esplanades of Wynn and Encore and you'll understand how this painstaking, time-honored craftsmanship has become the ulti- mate in contemporary luxury. clockwise from top left: The Palazzo Spini Feroni, home of the Ferragamo museum in Florence; Salvatore Ferragamo in 1956 with a stack of celebrity shoe forms; a shoe exhibit in the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo. 52 PhotograPhy by Vit torio Zunino Celot to/get t y images for Conde nast international luxury ConferenCe (Pal a ZZo sPini feroni); mondadori Portfolio Via get t y images (ferragamo); alessia PierdomeniCo/bloomberg Via get t y images (shoes) Ferragamo emphasized comfort as much as style, taking anatomy and mathematics classes at USC to puzzle out how to distribute weight over the arch of the foot.