Roger Vivier creative director Gherardo Felloni on his hands-on approach to redefining women’s footwear and the first time he heard of the man behind the iconic Italian brand – interview
- The sartorially sharp Italian talent was first a footwear designer for Miu Miu, having grown up around the family’s factory in Arezzo, Tuscany, where his uncle and father’s artisans made shoes for Hermès, Gucci and Prada
- Singer Cher, actresses Michelle Yeoh and Laura Dern, and former French first lady Carla Bruni were at this season’s Paris presentation – though this time, Felloni, a trained opera singer, did not burst into song
Women who like to dress from the feet up know that they can always rely on the whimsical creations of shoemaker Roger Vivier. No matter the vagaries of fashion – maximalism one day, minimalism the next, and with quiet luxury the trend du jour – the French label founded in 1937 is the go-to brand for shoes that add sparkle, often quite literally. Lavish embroidery, architectural shapes, crystal appliqués, ornamental buckles, vivid colours and shiny materials such as satin are just a few of the recurring elements in the repertoire of the brand, today helmed by Italian designer Gherardo Felloni.
The dapper gentleman couldn’t better embody the joie de vivre associated with Roger Vivier, which he joined in 2018 after working as a footwear designer for fashion label Miu Miu. Always clad in a crisp tailored shirt accessorised with sparkling necklaces and sporting a well-groomed moustache, in person Felloni recalls a character from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. His family owned a shoe factory in Arezzo, Tuscany, where he would spend his days looking at women’s footwear that his uncle and father’s artisans made for luxury labels such as Hermès, Gucci and Prada.
Given his background, it’s no surprise that Felloni loves spending time in the Italian workshops where Roger Vivier shoes are made. The brand is owned by Tod’s Group, the Italian company based in the Marche region of Italy that has a long tradition of shoemaking. Felloni splits his time between Paris, where the Roger Vivier design studio and atelier are based, and Italy, where he travels to look at prototypes and work closely with the artisans who turn his flights of fancy into reality.
“I draw everything by hand and then I go to the factory to see the shapes and the embroideries and I work in very close contact with the workers,” he says in an interview in Paris on the day of the Roger Vivier spring/summer 2024 presentation.
What Felloni never did was formally study fashion design. In fact he hadn’t even heard of Roger Vivier until the day of his interview with Miu Miu. “When I was waiting for my first job interview in their office I picked up this Roger Vivier book and I started looking at all these shoes and this one with this special comma-shape in fuchsia,” he says. “I still remember that moment and eventually that was one of the first shoes I found in the Roger Vivier archives and I kept it in my office to look at it every day because it’s the shoe that represents the brand and him best. It was the first shoe I saw in a book that caught my attention.”
The first thing that Felloni did after joining the brand was to collect as many archival pieces as he could get his hands on and display them on a huge table, before hiding them and coming up with his own pieces while still keeping in mind the DNA of the brand. “The memory of those shoes in my head after seeing them makes [my work] contemporary and modern,” he explains. “There’s no point in recreating old models; also because you can’t do certain things any more. Comfort is more important now than back in the 50s – heels then weren’t made for walking. It doesn’t make sense to take the old stuff and copy it but the memory of it helps reinterpret them like I did with the Virgule.”
He’s referring to that comma-shaped heel (virgule means “comma” in French), which along with the brand’s signature Belle Vivier – the buckled shoe famously worn by Catherine Deneuve in the 1967 film Belle de Jour – has come to represent the brand to the world.