Heels for men, camperos botos and moccasins with flowers: this is the new Spanish male shoe store
A shoe can be the simplest and most wiring in the world.The experts affirm that the Footwear League is disputed in the subtle distances: the stitches of a good seam - in Spanish, splicing -, the technique of tanning of the skin and the conventions of the genre are gestures capable of containing centuries of history.Not a sandal is so simple or a classic cord shoe is so motionless.The five profiles that star in these pages illustrate the routes and concerns of several generations of professionals who are transforming and preserving the trades of the footwear.There is a rural shoemaker that refines tradition from a town in the Camino de Santiago, a designer who proposes amazing heel shoes without gender from the avant -garde oasis of his Parisian study and two architects who began designing to fight stress and today look for solutionsso that the footwear stops being annoying forever.Another of the protagonists of this report has had to travel from Buenos Aires to Barcelona via Florencia to defend that crafts are not only methods, but ideas.And in another case, technology, artisanal reconversion and paradigm shift are necessary factors to save a local industry marked by immobility.
In a country that has always presumed Zapatero power and where today they manufacture their footwear of planetary prestige, these success and effort stories show that between the catwalk and the neighborhood shoe store there is a third way that does not break with the past, but neither does it eitherHe is anchored in him.
The inclusive heels of open
Abraham Ortuño was born in Elche (Alicante), one of the centers of the footwear industry in Spain."As a child, in the town, we played with the waste of the factories," he recalls.“We took the pieces of wood that had left over the manufacture of the hues.We painted them, we put ropes and tied them to the shoes.We were designing unintentionally ”.
Ortuño took her first steps with the designer Elena Cardona, who at that time worked creating accessories for Maison Margiela.“He drew well, but he wasn't a designer.And I wanted to do other things, ”he recalls.It was Cardona who recommended being enrolled in a master's degree in the prestigious Institut Français of the Mode, in Paris."I arrived without speaking English or French, and my way of working was a little crazier," he says.That methodology was the one that made the French designer Jacquemus choose him to design his accessories collections.Then came orders with brands like Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Kenzo or Jw Anderson.And, finally, his own firm, Open, from which he tried to alleviate a lack in the sector."I had always frustrated me that the brands I admire never made a bigger shoe than 41 when there were people willing to buy them," he says.Now, Abra produces in Alicante shoes with heel or with bright designs and colors traditionally associated with the female audience, but from 35 to 44.Last September he also presented his first fashion collection.But its center, he says, continues in the footwear.Where was it always.
The secret architecture of Aldanondoyfdez footwear
In 2011, Ignacio Aldanondo and Catuxa Fernández began to go every weekend to the workshop at the shoemaker Pitu Cunillera."We did it as a hobby, to dismiss ourselves," they explain.At that time they had an architecture study and they were almost a balsamic exercise."In architecture you delegates all.The shoe store is more controllable.Another teacher insisted that we learn to master the entire trade, from beginning to end, ”recalls Fernández.First they opened a domestic workshop where they created shoes for friends."We spent three years combining both things because it scared us".In 2015 they closed the architecture study and got off the way - ”to avoid temptations” - and set Aldanondoyfdez: a small workshop that produces atypical, delicate and resistant shoes with conceptual conceptual framework.
“We changed the way to build the shoe to appreciate the different elements and interstices.We created effects that would lead to the public to ask why and that would serve us to explain a technique ”.Now explore forms of functionality resolved by pending subjects."Many times we wear shoes that hurt us, they are not morphologically adequate," says Aldanondo."We are modifying our hues and making softer shoes, without heel, that generate an effect as closely as possible to walk barefoot.".
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Relear to make shoes with Javier Morato
In the house of Valverde del Camino (Huelva) where Javier Morato grew up in the mornings, he did not smell of coffee, but to skin."We had the workshop next to home and when the machines began to work we knew that sleeping was over," he recalls.He was not the only one;The Huelva town of him is famous for his Camperas Boots, "Botos", which the Rocío pilgrims carry and who lived a golden age in the eighties.However, that splendor has declined.And, paradoxically, says Morato, the only shoemaker company that has been created in the last two decades is theirs, which is also the first to have its own store in Madrid.He founded her after studying economics and working on the bank."I told my father that it made no sense that, having shoemakers at home, I had to buy shoes out," he recalls.It was a matter of opportunity: to take advantage of crafts in the area to make classic male footwear, a product that, curiously, had never been manufactured in the area.
He made the decision in 2012, but until 2017 he did not present his first collection.Meanwhile, he trained his employees, developed machinery and built a different workshop.He assures that this has been the main challenge: "Remove a craftsman from what he has been doing all his life".Therefore, he says, the ambitions of his workshop - amplium, bright, with large windows - is not so much to create a brand, "as a repositioning of a local industry".Therefore, among its plans is to develop dual training classrooms, transparency strategies and to guarantee the traceability of skins.
Ramón Laia artisan's boots travel the world
When Ramón Laia was a child, in his native Melide (A Coruña) there was "at least eight workshops" dedicated to footwear.“This was a land of shoemakers, and in the sixties, when there were less factory footwear, here the shoes were made daily.Then the industry monopolizing everything and the shoemakers disappeared.I stayed because I started as a child, I learned and opened my workshop ”.The eighties ran when this Galician inaugurated its business and gradually increased the complexity of its products.First, sandals and moccasins.Then, its best -selling models: a boot of mountaineering and another more hard, with leather turn, to work on the mountain.In the Plaza de Melide, the showcase of its store and workshop reflects the facade of the church of this town in the last stages of the Camino de Santiago.
Therefore, he says, many of his clients are pilgrims who commission models to take home as a souvenir and, as they soon discover, like daily footwear."Many repeat," he says.“The key is in the vegetable tanner of the skin and in the lining, of sheep wool.When the shoe is heated, the sole is molded, takes the shape of the foot and becomes very comfortable ”.The splicing technique - what Anglo -Saxons call good and contributes resistance to shoe and classic designs admit different uses.At a pace of production of a pair a day, Laia goes to fairs as well as its predecessors, although now they are no longer those of the surrounding villages, but those of crafts that are held throughout Spain.
Ergonomics, technique and tradition of Norman Vilalta
“For me, making shoes as 150 years ago is a mistake, but making shoes with the knowledge we have for 1.000 years is a success.That is crafts ".Argentino Norman Vilalta learned in a Florence workshop the two fundamental things to devote himself to footwear.“The first is to have Testa Di Calzolaio, Zapatero's head.The second, that there are many things that you do not know and you have to learn them ".After passing through the Tuscan city, Vilalta, who previously worked as a lawyer in Buenos Aires, opened his own workshop in Barcelona.The early days, he says, dedicated them to experiment.To consider impossible challenges, how to make a shoe using only 13 tools, or use raffia, seeds and flowers in their prototypes."My search is to express myself, find beauty and change things".At present, with a team of five artisans, Vilalta has a hybrid business model.On the one hand, shoes that make small runs and sells almost like drops, at a rate of three new models per month.On the other, different forms of customization ranging from the order on a commission (between four and five months) to a process as a year can be extended.Your customers are worldwide thanks to ephemeral sales in tailoring workshops and international stores.His seal, he says, is not in the nostalgia of other times, but in a way of applying details, silhouettes, finishes and patinas to flexible and light and extraordinarily subtle shoes."The idea is the most important thing,".
