Friend of the Straw Sandals Project and shoe model Kaycee donates her time and experience with contemporary footwear. We learn a lot more at photo sessions during which Kaycee wears and walks in a pair of shoes, describing how they feel and work. Here she is wearing a pair of Prada woven straw kitten heels with the front of the vamp made of alligator skin dyed a slate color and patent leather trim dyed salmon. The rest of the vamp is composed of a piece of plain weave that looks to contain three different kinds of fibers. The soles appear to be a combination of leather, synthetic materials and possibly wooden stacked heels. They are stamped Prada, made in Italy, vero cuolo, size 37. Kaycee commented that these shoes are surprisingly comfortable. The designer used the readily stretchable straw material in just the right place in the vamp to allow the foot to expand at its widest point across the ball of the foot when weight is applied during walking or standing. These shoes are good examples of the broad use of a variety of different materials in contemporary shoe construction. It is interesting that woven straw, traditionally the material of rural peoples, is among the materials used by high fashion shoe designers for urban lifestyles. The shoes are identified as It2 in the collection. (purchased on Ebay, rerunsboutiqueshop, Knoxville, TN, USA)
The second pair of shoes has an interesting story. It was marked It1 in the collection. The soles of theses shoes are stamped with Joseph Azagury, London, made in Italy, size 37.5. The vamps are straw and the construction method is twining using thick warps and thin wefts. The vamps entirely made from woven straw have that great quality of conforming easily to the shape and expansion of Kaycee’s feet.
It immediately caught my eye that the vamp was sewn into the leather footbed using a method characteristic of Moroccan shoes. We included the It1 Azagury shoes in one of our computer runs comparing footwear characteristics by cluster analysis. These shoes clustered with Moroccan shoes in the collection. It was one of the best indications early on that the similarity programs, the same ones used by biologists to determine phylogenetic relationships among plants and animals, were generating useful information about sandal relationships. The Joseph Azagury It1 shoes are shown below with Mor2, authentic Morroccan shoes.
Now, I had to learn more about the designer, Joseph Azagury. His biography on-line revealed that he learned the footwear trade as a shoe salesman at Harrods of London, studied at London’s Cordwainers College, and that the JA collection is considered a leading designer label in the United Kingdom. He has worked in Italy, also Spain and the USA, and likely had come to appreciate the high quality of materials and workmanship of high end shoes made in Italy. So, what about the validity of our computer program that clustered with Morocco these shoes designed in London and made in Italy? It turns out that Joseph Azagury was born and raised in Morocco! He came to London as a young man. For the shoes shown below, he was obviously strongly influenced by the design and construction of shoes from his native land. The seller told me that the shoes had been purchased at an estate sale in Scottsdale, AZ, USA (Purchased on Ebay in the on-line store daytona7beach)
