Dapper shoemaker extraordinaire Robert Clergerie sips his coffee and gazes across Victoria Harbour from a cafe next to IFC's Lane Crawford. He is here to promote his spring-summer collection and to celebrate Lane Crawford's collaboration with photographer Laurent Segretier - an exhibition of craftsmanship at work in his factory. Black-and-white photos mounted on brick walls capture the everyday scenes at the label's heart of operations.
After more than 30 years in the business, and now in his 70s, Clergerie is one of the few luxury shoemakers left in France to own the factory producing his own line. The factory, in Romans, is a source of pride and enjoyment because 'my pleasure is to be in the factory or the studio - I don't care about the commercial sense.'
Hong Kong-Paris-based Segretier had total freedom to photograph what he liked, and recalls that taking a train to the factory was 'like taking a time machine back to a place where there was no stress for modernity. It was amazing to see the craftsmanship and inner workings of the factory, and discovering the hidden secrets of shoemaking.'
If the name Robert Clergerie excites you more than that of Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik or Christian Louboutin, chances are you won't have a pair of painful stilettos on your feet, and old plasters hanging off the back. Clergerie is a functionalist, an auteur for women who prefer walking, rather than posing, in beautiful shoes.
'The first Asian customer we had was Madame Joyce Ma in 1981,' Clergerie recalls. But the label is still not well established in Asia because Clergerie's style is more demure than that of his flashy contemporaries.
'A shoe has to be comfortable,' he insists. 'I like the touch of the leather, and the shoe is a sculpture. A dress without someone inside it has no meaning, but a shoe, even with no one wearing it, has a life because you are working on a sculpture in space.'
