Handmade Shoes and Conservatories– Part 2
Our friend, Jae Brown, has a very interesting collection of shoes. In fact, so interesting and unusual, it is going to be on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh beginning in April 2011.
In the early 1990’s, Jae was in Crete (Greece) during one of her many visits and came upon a small shop in the town of Heraklion. It was the retail outlet of the master shoemaker and extraordinary artist Vasilis Stamatakis. Fascinated by one of the items she saw in the window, she inquired of the owner and over the next five years a friendship between Vasilis and Jae blossomed.
Vasilis was born to a farming family living near Heraklion in 1916. As a boy, he hated farming and at an early age, became fascinated with boot making. He trained under master bootmakers in Crete and later in Athens, an unheard of distance away at the time and learned to cater to the extravagant tastes of extremely wealthy clients.
He learned the trade secrets that included how to make the fabulous wedding and trousseau pumps, exquisite little shoes for babies, and even specially footwear to wear in the coffin for the high society of the time. Little by little, he had worked his way up to full-fledged Master Shoemaker from shop assistant.
The amazing thing about his art work is the absolutely bizarre circumstances under which he worked. Once in business for himself, each painstakingly handmade pair of his exquisite shoes, produced decade after decade, were made completely in secret and never offered for sale. For although he had a retail shoe shop and an extremely well equipped workshop, his high-style handmade pieces were never even displayed but were done entirely for his own pleasure.
His downtown Heraklion shop “The Elite Shoe Shop” displayed and sold only the rigidly-conservative humdrum footwear mass produced by the wholesale shoe manufacturers in Athens. The reason for this is that Vasilis early on realized that the ultra-conservative matrons who were his customers wanted only the inoffensive ordinary brown and black low-heeled pumps or sandals. In 1941 when he opened his shop, Crete was incredibly conservative and there was no market for the stunning pieces of art he would handcraft.
So over the course of a year and a half, Jae purchased thirty five pairs of shoes from his collection (then in storage) all of which he had made by hand in his Heraklion workshop. The work was done between the years 1941 and 1969 when Vasilis retired and handed the shop over to his daughter.
I was first introduced to Jae’s extraordinary collection during a visit to the Riverstone property in Foxburg Pennsylvania. They had just completed a photo shoot using local friends as models and set them against the great backdrop of the Foxburg estate and mansion. The photographer, Dennis Keys also took some photos at his farm.
You can see these extraordinary works at his website.
Jae herself has set up a website devoted to the life and art of Vasilis Stamatakis. Visit the site and learn about ‘REMBETIKA’ – THE MUSIC THAT INSPIRED VASILIS’ FABULOUS DESIGNS
Might be worth a trip to Pittsburgh too.
Alan