This Is How Louis Vuitton Hand-Shapes Pharrell’s Sneakers
Pharrell Williams had a vision for his new Louis Vuitton sneakers, and it all hinged on the company’s footwear artisans sourcing the right leather. The brief from Pharrell was for something “butter soft,” a descriptor so integral to the shoe’s development that it became its title.
“The leather was a problem,” says Walter Carinelli, style coordination manager for Louis Vuitton Men’s shoes. “We wanted to use a nappa leather which is not usually suitable for [this kind of sneaker] as it creates a lot of wrinkles.” But after a long, intensive testing process, Carinelli and LV’s other footwear artisans hit upon the solution: a specially made “nappa butter leather” with an unparalleled “subtleness and strength.”
This is why Louis Vuitton still makes all of its shoes in-house.
All of this crucial footwear development is done in a facility hosted by a small sleepy village outside of Venice. Fiesso d'Artico, as it’s known, is a shoebox-shaped building that opened its doors to all stages of Vuitton’s shoemaking craft in 2009.
And that craft cannot be overstated. The Buttersoft alone demanded nearly a half-dozen attempts to nail the oversized proportions that Pharrell desired, a delicate balancing act that involved exaggerating the upper’s chunk without pushing it into clown-shoe territory.
The shoe was then individually fitted to a lightweight EVA sole unit with a hand-applied groove running along the middle and diagonally stitched in the style of old Louis Vuitton trunks.
“The aim was to remain very simple in terms of structure to create a shoe that has very pure lines in order to give all the attention to the Vuitton savoir faire,” says Carinelli. He is standing in the formier workshop, where the shoemaking process begins and footwear history lines the walls. Simple metal shelving units reach from floor to ceiling, each carrying eleven rows of neatly aligned shoe lasts.
These are the molds that shape Louis Vuitton’s footwear. There are as many of these wooden foot-shaped sculptures as there are LV shoes, each hand-carved using a fine chisel and sandpaper. As such, there are hundreds of lasts. But Gigi Agostini, Louis Vuitton’s master last-maker, hardly even has to look when selecting one, instinctively pulling out lasts as disparate as those from Louis Vuitton’s long sold-out Nike Air Force 1 collaboration and traditional Oxford boots. It’s muscle memory at this point.
Agostini has been working at Louis Vuitton since 1979, perfecting his last-making craft over the course of nearly five decades. And though it’s undeniably impressive that he has dedicated almost half a century to a singular skill, Agostini’s story isn’t novel. Or at least, it isn’t at Louis Vuitton.
“The people who work here really become a guru in a single operation. That’s a main feature of our meaning of luxury. Luxury for us is the sum of every step of production made by a specialist by hand,” says Francesca Bergami, a communications supervisor, during a whistle-stop tour of all the departments in the 14,000-square-meter Fiesso d'Artico facility.
It’s here where creative directors Nicolas Ghesquière and Pharrell Williams come to develop every new shoe, mulling over details with Fiesso d'Artico’s prototype office. Then, if it makes the market, that design will be carefully crafted on one of Fiesso d'Artico’s four artisanal production lines: women’s shoes, men’s shoes, driving shoes, and sneakers.
In the vast sneaker-making workshop, rows of artisans are illuminated under clinical white lighting that casts a harsh glare on any potential blemish or loose thread. Here, I find Katja Fabian laboriously producing new pairs of the Buttersoft. Fabian is another 50-year Louis Vuitton veteran and runs the Fiesso d'Artico facility’s stitching academy. A generation ago, her mother made Louis Vuitton children’s shoes.
Fabian is one of Fiesso d'Artico’s jack of all trades. One moment, she’s delicately hand-painting three coats of chocolate brown paint on the edges of branded leather patches. The next, she’s meticulously hand-stitching leather panels together till a seemingly random amalgamation of shapes forms the upper of a shoe. Fabian and her team do it all. For instance, they’re the ones who cut, paint, and assemble the core materials into a near-finished Buttersoft, though the process of hammering and gluing the sole is handled by another department.
Around 250 operations go into a single shoe and 250 artisans perform them all under this very roof.
Bergami is tight-lipped about exactly how many shoes are made at Fiesso d'Artico.
However, during my visit in mid-July, the men’s footwear team is fresh from launching the Buttersoft which, she says, is almost entirely made here. (The only exception being when demand spikes and other LV workshops are called upon for help.)
This is what makes Fiesso d'Artico an anomaly. Louis Vuitton is hardly the only luxury brand producing luxury shoes, but it is one of the few French fashion houses to vertically integrate an in-house operation of this scale, handling every arduous, artful step of the fine shoemaking process.
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