Last year's first post was dedicated to fashion and architecture. Let's continue the tradition this year by looking this time at historical shoes with an architectural flair about them and in particular at Steven Arpad's footwear.
The designer produced lines of leather accessories and jewellery under his own name in the 1940s, but also collaborated anonymously with other fashion houses. Arpad worked indeed in Paris for Balenciaga and in the US for Delman and I. Miller.
In 1947 Arpad donated his sketches, five finished shoes and a group of over seventy-five shoe prototypes designed in Paris in 1939 to the Brooklyn Museum.
Thanks to the digital archives of the Met Museum we can currently admire online the shoe prototypes also known as "pullovers", that is the models formed over and nailed to wooden lasts, some with heels (and in some cases the heel continues the design theme of the upper), some without.
Dark colours and metallic details often prevail in the prototypes, but the colours of the shoes are in a way secondary to the elegant shapes, fluid and curvilinear edges, geometrical or architectural details and sweeping lines that characterise them.
Creative and unusual, some prototypes have a sculptural flair, others are characterised by a tremendous sense of dynamism. A shoe with prow-like flanges calls to mind the curves of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum; a pair of shoes that appeared in the October 1939 issue of Vogue as a design for Balenciaga, include a unique platform that, according to the Met Museum notes, strongly recalls aqueduct forms.
Bizarrelly enough, some shoes seem to anticipate precise architectural features built quite a few years later: the platform shape of Arpad's shoes for Balenciaga is evoked in Sergio Musmeci's Bridge on the Basento (designed in 1967 and built between 1972 and 1974) that was characterised by a fluid shape and by weighty voids and a complex structure; the tab extension around the wedge of an elegant pair of black shoes from 1939 is echoed instead in Zaha Hadid's Library & Learning Centre of the University of Economics & Business Vienna with its inclined and straight edges, while a sporty shoe with particularly attractive eyelets and angular toes featuring a stratified colour scheme on the wedge somehow anticipated the colourful walls of Renzo Piano's auditorium in L'Aquila.
In a way these connections almost prove that great designs from the past can be studied in connection with present trends in other fields such as architecture and even provide us with a glimpse of what the future of design may look like.
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