Making my First Shoe: Part 1 - The Inspiration

For my first semester, my shoe class has been designing and making a basic pump. FIT provided us with lasts and we basically had free reign to design anything we liked using said last. The last I got was a size 40 ex-Stuart Weitzman last with a slightly square toe and about an inch of a heel. Not exactly the kind of last I would use to design normally but a last none the less! I've been waiting for the past 5 years to do this so I wasn't going to let a crappy last get the better of me! For such a conservatively shaped last I really needed a good source of inspiration.

For some reason that week I had become a little obsessed with San Francisco. It's the city my Mother is from and where my Grandmother lived most of her life. Despite being half American I have only ever spent time here in New York. I have never visited other cities(Newark doesn't count) but San Francisco is at the top of my list. There is a sort of romance in my head about the idea of visiting the city where my mum grew up, to see the apartment my grandma Rita lived in and experience those crazy steep hills. I remember as a child I had bad dreams about the hills of San Francisco being too steep and I would always fall down them. One of my roommates always watches reruns of Charmed too so that probably helps. The point is I was inspired to collect photographs of San Francisco, specifically the old Victorian architecture painted in the most eclectic colours. It sort of goes with my feelings on colour mixing: matchy matchy, mis-matched; it really doesn't matter as long as you have colour.

I always start off with the shape of the shoe first. Initially I was inspired by the idea of having a really ornately decorated shoe with the wooden cut out detailing in the photograph above forming the toe of the upper. After a few goes at trying to sketch out this idea I realized that if I couldn't draw it there was no way I could use it in my shoe! So I scratched that idea and focused more on those crazy colours.

All pictures in this post are credited to Flickr users (unfortunately I just saved photos to my desktop so I have no idea who) if you own these photographs please email me if you'd like me to take them down.