That mesmerising back lift counter detail

Did it ever happen to you to see a pair of shoes from many decades ago and suddenly start wishing they were still being made since they look like the perfect shoes for you?

Well, that’s exactly what happens to me quite often, especially when I look at old magazines from the 30s or the 40s.

Salvatore Ferragamo’s designs, even the early ones, always manage to amaze me since they are incredibly modern even nowadays.

At times it’s a shoe detail that mesmerises me or the way a specific material was employed; others it's the embroideries or the embellishments used to decorate the upper.

There is for example a series of shoes Ferragamo designed in the mid-to-late 30s that featured five sets of eyelets, a black antelope upper with padded collar and a horn toe that transformed the wearer’s feet into an aggressive looking (yet irresistibly stylish) rhino head.

The shoes were available with a wedge or in their high-heeled version, but that horn toe – that reappeared in a slightly different version in Christopher Kane’s Spring/Summer collection merged with dinosaur inspirations – still manages to impress me as incredibly avant-garde and modern.

There is also a 1935 laced shoe in suede by Salvatore Ferragamo with a collar characterised by a geometrical cut that I quite like because it is often compared in fashion books to a hat by Elsa Schiaparelli that appeared in a 1937 Vogue issue.

There are actually quite a few patents for Ferragamo’s shoes designed between 1939 and 1940 (in particular patents n. 15949, n. 17275, n. 18632, n. 18667 and  18670) that I particularly love.

These patents refer to a ladies’ shoe with raised counter; a shoe with edge heel and upper with tall sides; a light heeled shoe with back lift fastened on the front with lace and bow; a ladies’ boot with upper raised forward on the instep and partial lacing and a light shoe with two-point shaped front lifts and one back lift (point-shaped) on the counter.

What I particularly like about these shoes is that, in some cases, thanks to that raised counter detail, they end up looking like crossovers between a court shoe and a mid-calf boot.

I often looked at such pictures with longing and desire, hoping one day to see modern reinterpretations of these shoes, but I think I have finally found them from a Marche-based company called Piampiani.

This independent factory owns unassuming looking shops scattered all over Italy and basically sells high quality shoes, made in Italy and at very affordable prices (very rarely anything is priced over €99).

The black suede high heeled shoes I recently found from one of their shops include a platform and a slight raised counter that give the boots a harmonious silhouette and call back to mind some of the models from Ferragamo's patents. 

The company’s site is still under construction, so at the moment you can only buy their shoes directly from their stores (though a few designs – mainly boots – are also sold in a Chicago-based shop), but if you happen to be in Italy and are looking for real Italian shoes that don’t hurt your feet (a thing that doesn’t happen so often nowadays…) and that don’t cost a fortune, check them out.

Having satisfied my thirst for that raised counter detail, I wonder if they would be able to come up with a reproduction of some early designs by André Perugia or maybe I'm asking too much?