WHAT MARKS THE passage of boy to man? In certain African tribes, rituals of pain and endurance prove your manhood. In the most elite fashion tribes, however, it's an altogether different rite of passage - namely, the age at which a man acquires his first pair of Berluti shoes.
'A shoe announces you, it precedes you,' says Olga Berluti. And what a way to make an entrance. Berluti is the fourth-generation shoemaker of the house of Berluti, founded by her great-grandfather in 1895. She began working for him in the mid-1960s at the age of 17, slowly regenerating the business to make it what it is today - a high-end men's footwear retailer with a bespoke emphasis.
Berluti's client list is like a who's who of famous men through the ages, boasting such famous names as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Luchino Visconti, John F. Kennedy and Andy Warhol. From the Moulin Rouge to Studio 54, Berluti's exclusive, made-to-measure shoes have graced the feet of the most dapper gents.
'All our clients are exceptional, not just the famous ones,' says Berluti, a petite woman with cropped hair and sparkling blue eyes. 'Everyone is part of our history at Berluti, from the famous to the average.' She isn't the sort to be dazzled by fame. 'Yves Saint Laurent brought Andy Warhol for some shoes when I was 17, ' she says. 'To me it was normal.'
To Berluti, who likens the business to a convent, shoemaking is a quasi-monastic ritual that must be undertaken with the utmost reverence. To label her a mere bootmaker wouldn't do justice to her craft; she is part sculptress, part physiologist, part artist and part mind-reader. She can sense what kind of shoe a man will require just by looking at him.
'The way he moves, sits down, pushes a door open, leads me to understand very quickly whether he wants a shoe that will be seen straight away or a shoe that people will discover bit by bit.'
So where does this intuition come from? 'Everything I've learned is because I wasn't allowed to do what a normal bootmaker would do, so I had to learn other ways,' she says. Berluti's delicate features and bird-like frame belie the fact that, as one of a tiny number of women to succeed in the men's shoe business, she has a will of iron. Her education in the ways of men's feet began when she was discouraged from assisting in the Berluti workshop on rue Marbeuf, near the Champs-Elysees in Paris.