October 27, 1989: It may be cold and gray outside, but Leon Beltran is making sandals. He’s got them on lasts, the plastic forms over which shoes are fitted, and one by one he’s gluing the straps to the sole. As he works, Beltran hunches over, his head practically touching the table on the other side of the shoe. He presses a strap into place, pulls it up, presses and pulls again until he’s satisfied. But the leather wrinkles as he handles it, and by the time he’s done with some pieces, they look like paper that’s been crumpled up and smoothed out again. “This leather is not going to look very good by the time I get done with it,” Beltran says. He frowns, but keeps working.
Skellenger, who started out at the School of the Art Institute teaching an accessory-design class, also designs shoes for Florsheim. She’s been a shoe fanatic for years–buying them, reading about them, taking pictures of them, going to museums to see them. Seven semesters ago, she finally persuaded the school to let her teach a class devoted exclusively to shoes. Now she spends one day a week trying to pass on her enthusiasm to her students.
From about 1066 AD (the Norman invasion), European styles changed about once every century. As the pace of civilization was stepped up, styles changed and innovations cropped up more frequently. In 1660, Englishman Samuel Pepys invented the buckle–the big kind most people associate with Pilgrims–as a replacement for the leather thong, which had been used to secure shoes for two centuries. In 1790 the French introduced shoelaces, and by 1791 buckles were so passe that 20,000 people were laid off in the buckle-making capital of England, Birmingham. A shoemaker in Philadelphia broke ground in 1822 by making the first set of lasts that differentiated the right and left feet; still, it wasn’t until after the Civil War that the idea of right and left shoes really became accepted. Cowboy boots and rubber-soled sneakers made their first appearances sometime in the early 1800s. Then, in 1934, shoe styles came full circle: open-toed sandals became popular in Miami.
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The first things her students draw are their lasts. Their second assignment is to design two shoe collections, groups of shoes to complement two designers’ fall lines–which means 48 separate sketches of shoes. Kim Brown, a junior with wild red hair who dresses in vintage 60s minidresses and bell-bottoms, designs strange heels for one of her collections. She draws shoes that look like guns, with the heels as grips. She draws heels that look like miniature human legs, and heels that look like layer cakes. “I’m interested in cakes,” she said. “These are on a plate, so you can have a wedge cut out but the shoe is still steady to walk on. I thought I might make one of them a German chocolate cake.”
Leon Beltran’s drawing looks like the three-dimensional plot of some wild geometric equation. The shoes are basically a grid of thick black leather straps that cover the foot, but only one strap actually touches the foot, right above the ball. From ball to toe, the grid is rounded out from the foot like a light bulb; above the ball, the shoe gradually flares out like the mouth of a megaphone. “My surroundings while I’m designing influence me a lot,” says Beltran. “I was looking out the window and thinking about the shapes of the office buildings over there.”
So Akers shows the class how to make flats. She introduces a few new tools, gives the students a few shoe-making terms, and puts together a shoe in front of them. Like Skellenger, Akers does her demonstration using one shoe, not a pair; both shoemakers have quite a collection of unmatched shoes. “Someday I’d like to make a pair,” says Skellenger.
