As lockdown restrictions are gradually eased in various countries and the vaccine campaigns continue all over the world, we start hoping that things may get better and that, in a few months' time, we may return to our pre-Covid lives (but let's not forget that there are countries where the pandemic is still growing, so the Coronavirus emergency is not over yet). As the days pass and we feel that Summer may not be so far away, we also dream of holidays and warm days.
So, moving from the themes of returning to normality and going on holiday, let's search in museum archives for items that may inspire us? Check out for example the Pelican Footwear platform shoes featured in this post - all from the Museum at FIT.
Pelican Footwear Nyc Ltd. was a custom shoe store founded in the 1970s by a husband and wife duo, Italian-American Joseph Bascetta (all his grandparents were from Sicily) and Carole Reidford.
All the design, fabrication and sales occurred at their Bowery loft. Carole hand carved the original prototypes of the platform shoes as she was a sculptor (browse the Internet and you will discover some wonderful gravity-defying carved wooden platforms she created).
Orders came in from around the world so the Bascettas' shoes went global even though they were made locally.
Pelican’s clients included David Bowie and The New York Dolls, who featured their shoes on the cover of their debut LP. David Bowie opted for the palm platform sandals (second image in this post) during his Ziggy Stardust tour in the '70s.
The shop and the Bascettas relocated in Hartford and in the late '80s-early '90s the duo eventually switched from making shoes to piercing and doing tattoos, opening the Pelican Tattoo & Body Piercing.
There's just five pairs of Pelican shoes in the Museum at FIT archive (designed in the early '70s), but they all look eccentric and fun: some of them feature hand-decorated platforms with motifs of strawberries or with carved palms calling to mind Carmen Miranda's style, but there are also glam sandals such as red and black platform mules with splashes of gold glitter and synthetic black satin open toe sandals with a chevron black, yellow and glittery fuchsia motif.
Though some of these shoes may not be to everybody's taste, their joyful extravagance is maybe just what we need as we dream about that ebullient feeling of extraordinary normality that we've all been missing in our lives.
Comments