Salvatore Ferragamo Handbags and Shoes History.
The story of Salvatore Ferragamo – which he himself recounted in an autobiographical book, Shoemaker of Dreams published in English in 1957 (George G. Harrap & Co., London) and later in Italian in 1971 (Sansoni, Florence) – reads like the storyline of a film: a film where the protagonist incarnates a world of values and qualities within which, in the end, the dream of a lifetime comes true.
Salvatore Ferragamo was born in 1898 in Bonito, a village about a hundred kilometres from Naples, the eleventh of fourteen children. Even before he reached adolescence, he revealed a great passion for shoes: at the age of 11 he was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Naples, and at 13 he opened his own shop in Bonito. Salvatore already knew very clearly what he wanted: to ennoble a trade considered humble and to create a form of quality craftsmanship through the search for functional and aesthetic perfection.
But for him, as for numerous youths from southern Italy in those years, the path of destiny was that of emigration. At the age of 14 he reached America and joined one of his brothers who was working in a large footwear company in Boston. Salvatore was fascinated by the modern machinery and working procedures, but at the same time horrified: this was not shoemaking! In the early twenties he moved to Santa Barbara, California to join another brother, and here he opened a shoe-repair shop.
In those years, California was a dreamland where the cinema industry was in its prime. Salvatore began to design and make cowboy boots for the westerns and Roman and Egyptian sandals for the historic motion picture of important directors and producers. Actors and actresses became aware of the beauty and comfort of these shoes and from Salvatore they soon began to order footwear for off the set. Meanwhile Salvatore himself, in his constant search for ‘shoes which fit perfectly’ studied human anatomy, chemical engineering and mathematics at the University of Los Angeles.
When the cinema industry moved to Hollywood, Salvatore Ferragamo followed. In 1923 he opened the ‘Hollywood Boot Shop’, which marked the start of his career as ‘shoemaker to the stars’, as he was defined by the local press. Famous names such as Mary Pickford, Rudolf Valentino, John Barrymore Jr., Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson and others became his devoted customers and his popularity boomed. Salvatore was ahead of the times in bringing dramatic changes to fashion during these years: he opened up women’s shoes, until then straight-laced and closed, making them more elegant and comfortable, and he also created the first sandals. His success was such that he couldn’t keep pace with the orders: the time had come to organise himself on a larger scale.
The American labour force was, however, not capable of making the kind of shoes he wanted, and in 1927 Ferragamo decided to return to Italy, to Florence, a city traditionally rich in skilled craftsmanship. From his Florentine workshop – in which he adapted the production line system to the specialised and strictly manual operations of his own workers – he launched a constant flow of exports to the States. Then came the great crisis of 1929 which brusquely interrupted relations with the American market, and the firm went bankrupt. Ferragamo, however, did not lose heart but instead turned his energies to the national market. Business went so well that in 1936 he was renting two workshops and a shop in Palazzo Spini Feroni, in via Tornabuoni.
