On the heels of success
THAT GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI would one day end up designing shoes is not, perhaps, completely surprising given that he was born in the Italian town of San Mauro Pascoli. There are approximately 8,000 inhabitants of San Mauro and 3,000 of them work in the shoe industry. All the big names - Yves Saint Laurent, Sergio Rossi, Gucci - have their shoe lines created in San Mauro because that's where you go to get the best ones made. It must be a foot fetishist's dream destination.
Nevertheless, Zanotti's mother was determined that her son would have nothing to do with shoes.
'I studied electronics because you know how parents push,' he says. 'My father was an artist - poor, poor, poor - and my mother did not want her son to continue this tradition. Then I became a DJ and then, at 23, I started making shoes by hand in a little factory. Every night, I was there until midnight learning the culture of the shoe.'
Zanotti is sitting in On Pedder - which is full of rich, rich, rich women - and he's surrounded by shoes. As he speaks, he's fondling a gold-chained, vertiginous stiletto as worn by Madonna in her latest video. Next to it is a glittery, gem-encrusted sculpture which encased the foot of Cindy Crawford when she escorted Zanotti to an awards ceremony organised by the Fashion Footwear Association of New York. He won the Best Designer Award 2000 so maybe it's just as well his mother didn't get her way.
It's a success story not without its particular hardships. Zanotti, a charming man who tries to mask a truly original streak with sober clothing (he still yearns after his punk days of blue hair and yellow glasses) has been in business for only six years. His commercial partner is Giorgio Vicini.
Vicini the company produces Vicini the shoe line (available at Joyce and I T), Roberto Cavalli, Patrick Cox and Giuseppe Zanotti.
When they started in 1994, they employed 15 people. Now their staff numbers 140 and their turnover has increased from 1.6 billion lire (HK$5.6 million) to 45 billion lire.
Zanotti and his wife, Cinzia (who comes from the shoe family Casadei based, naturally, in San Mauro), have been ploughing the money back into factories and improving production, so it's only fairly recently that they've been able to look around and breathe the air of success.
'It was really, really quiet in the beginning,' Zanotti says. 'I was not famous, nobody knew me. Nobody wanted to produce shoes for me, they said they were too crazy, too sexy. At that time, the direction was more sporty, casual, more everyday.' These adjectives could by no means be applied to a Giuseppe Zanotti design.
It's true that, a couple of videos ago, Madonna wore a pair of crystal and silver wedge Zanotti sandals while wandering on a beach but, on the whole, they're the sort of footwear you'd want to have a full gala occasion to parade in.
'They're shoes for a party, a special occasion,' says the designer. 'Every woman can leave a space in her closet for a little Zanotti shoe. If 100,000 women like our shoes, that's enough.'
Mass production, therefore, is not the point of the exercise, and the price, like the heels, is high. Those Cindy Crawford dazzlers, for instance, are on sale in On Pedder for $3,900. When Zanotti speaks of his craft, however, while stroking a nearby shoe, you can feel the attraction: it's the art of wheedling seduction, half-teasing and half-serious.
'For the first shoe, I prefer to make the last myself and I need one month to prepare it. The last [the curved surface upon which a shoe is stitched] is like the body of a woman. Perfect.' What happens if it's an imperfect body? Zanotti raises a quizzical eyebrow.
'I speak about a dream. And a woman sometimes needs to dream. I study the proportion, the foot . . . I know perfectly the foot. I need to do this, it's my drugs, if I don't make it, I go crazy. I need to produce it with my hand. Afterwards, I'm fine.'
He does not, you won't be surprised to hear, make men's shoes (so the two Zanotti boys, aged six and eight, will have to go elsewhere for their footwear). 'I hate! I don't want to think about men's shoes. The men, you know, are conservative, traditional, they like the same thing every day.'
On the other hand, he is not averse to a little diversification: he's moving into handbags and for autumn/winter 2001, he will have a range of evening belts.
Fashion being what it is, of course, he's already in the imaginative grip of other seasons. One of Zanotti's hallmarks is the juxtaposition of unusual materials (jute, a ceramic heel, plexiglass) and for next winter, he wants to experiment with fish-scales ('like very black and shiny diamonds'), black marble, feathers and mother-of-pearl.
Talking about this, and the inevitable zeitgeist of fashion, makes him excited. 'It's mine,' he says, trying to describe the slippery process of inspiration. 'It's not direction from - oh I don't know, Dolce & Gabbana - it's personal. When we have our eyes and our ears and our brain and our hands, we can always tell our feelings about something. Inside, we have a little thing talking to us - 'Hello! I'm here!' - and I think about fashion in this way.'
Was he like that as a child, growing up in the shoe town of San Mauro Pascoli? 'When I was eight years old, I was the same exactly,' says Zanotti with a laugh. 'I had the same ghost inside. I think I was searching for something. Inside, when we grow up, we are ever the same.'
