Firenze Time Out

When I was in Florence, I found the time to pry myself away from the perfect pin striped suits, immaculately matched shoes and socks and too-tanned-prettiness of Pitti Uomo and made my way to the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum.  Back up there.  As a somewhat vocal devotee of Ferragamo shoes and having been to Florence five times, I've NEVER been to the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum?!?  *Clasped hands to chest major gasp*

To be fair, I'm a half-hearted devotee, harbouring an addiction to the Vara pump which was in fact created by Salvatore Ferragamo's daughter Fiamma in 1978, long after the shoe maestro's death.  With four pairs and counting, half an hour each day is exclusively devoted to scouring eBay ensuring that I haven't missed any unusual colour ways in size US8A – that's hard work, that is. 

Therefore the visit shored up my scatty knowledge of Ferragamo's legacy, with a glimpse into a teensy part of his 10,000 shoe archive (he was a fastidious hoarder…) as the basement of the Via Tornabuoni store.  Cleverly of course, after being entranced by the museum's exhibits of Ferragamo treasures, you can go straight up into the store to do some 'inspired shopping' which is how I nearly spanked a wack of money on some new Varas, stopping myself to say "eBay will yield me better ones…" 

In the 'Creations' section of the store, you can also buy re-issued replicas of 1930s-40s Ferragamo originals which come at a pretty penny but are so far distinguished from the conservative ilk of Ferragamo shoes that they really are quite astonishing as shoe speciments consideirng the age of design. 

There were a few things that I knew before seeing the exhibition – that Ferragamo held many patents and trademarks to shoe shapes which he could call entirely his own, that he blended science and art when approaching shoe design and that he had strong ties with Hollywood.

I love this quote from Ferragamo's autobiography Shoemaker of Dreams (I must try and find a user copy of this‚Ķ): "I have divided the women who have come to me into three categories: the Cinderella, the Venus, and the Aristocrat. The Cinderella takes a shoe smaller that Size Six, the Venus takes Size Six, the Aristocrat a seven or larger."  I'm presuming he means US sizes in which case I'm neither Cindrella or Venus.

The first section of the museum documents Ferragamo's relationship with Hollywood starlets well with clientale that included Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Lauren Bacall and for me, most famously Judy Garland, who for me will be equally associated with the famed Ferragamo "Rainbow Platforms" as seen above, as well as her ruby red slippers.  Through the 30s-50s, you can really see how Ferragamo experimented and pushed boundaries of what materials could be used creatively in times of rationing and restraint – cork, fish skin, cellophane and raffia were just some of the things that Ferragamo used in prototypes, some more successful than others but a lot of these styles have had a lasting impact just by looking totally contemporary and standing up to what is out there today.    

The museum's permanent collection is accompanied by temporal exhibitions, with the previous one about Ferragamo as Craftsman covered extensively by the blog Theatre of Fashion.  When I went, they had just started the 'Salvatore Ferragamo: Inspiration and Vision' exhibition where the curator has made a connection between the discoveries of Ferragamo's time – the excavation of Tutankhamon's tombs and  other archaeological and ethnographic finds that were inspiration material for Ferragamo. 

I particularly love this chain sandal created in 1956 for a private client (the chain is unique to Ferragamo's design) and its ties with Andy Warhol's shoe drawings from 1955…

In the next part of the exhibition, they present a connection between Salvatore Ferragamo and Futurism.  Certainly Ferragamo had ties with Futurism especially as Italian Futurists such as Lucio Venna created the Ferragamo logo as well as several adveritising campaigns.  Still, the link is presented as a hypothetical one – Ferragamo may not have met Sonia Delauney, Thayaht or Giacoma Balla but you can certainly draw parrallels between their work and Ferragamo's creations in the 50s-60s.  

The final part of the museum presents again an imagined parrallel between the creations of milliner Stephen Jones and Ferragamo.  Both creators don't seem to be restrained by their product genres.  The creative heights of shoes and hats can be dizzying in both cases as displayed in this portion of the exhibition.  It's extraordinary to think that the shoes seen in the museum are just a teensy tiny portion of the full Ferragamo archive which means the possibilities for exhibition curation are endless, making this museum more than just a rudimentary history footnote to the expanding Salvatore Ferragamo brand of today, but a real contextual foundation for customer and enthusiast to enjoy.