FEET FIRST: Fashion’s ongoing shoe fetish will reach a new zenith during Paris Fashion Week in October. That’s when French accessories firm Roger Vivier plans to unveil a retrospective exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, a complex dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Titled “Virgule, etc…in the footsteps of Roger Vivier” after the French designer’s comma-shaped heel, the showcase is to run from Oct. 2 to Nov. 18.
Olivier Saillard, director of the Musée Galliera, which is reopening in late September with an Azzedine Alaïa retrospective, moonlighted as curator on the Vivier project,with scenography by Jean-Julien Simonot. About 140 models are to go on display, many of them on loan from the Musée de la Chaussure in Romans, France, and other institutions, including Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The exhibition is to recount the colorful history of the founder, who died in 1998, and its revival since 2000, when Diego Della Valle, chairman and chief executive officer of Tod’s SpA, purchased the rights to use the late designer’s name and in 2002 tapped Bruno Frisoni to be its new creative director.
The brand lore includes Vivier’s invention of the stiletto heel for Dior in 1955 and the buckle pump made famous by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Buñuel’s 1967 movie “Belle de Jour.” The Paris-based designer shod such high-profile types as Josephine Baker and the Duchess of Windsor.