Chic feet
El Diablo's handmade shoes will have you stepping in style
By Ceda Xiong
Published: January 29th, 2008 | 2:37pm
Daphne Board’s Etsy store has none of the amateurish stock of bottle cap jewelry or knitted iPod cozies, instead her store is filled with the kind of bespoke craft that associates more with Savile Row — she makes custom shoes. A glance through her inventory will show the impressive range of her craft, from soft-rounded kitten heels to knee-length studded leather boots.
Her shoes bear an unmistakable resemblance to nothing else because the hand-crafted quality separates from factory-made. Since we already get our gear fix tailor-made to our needs, from Mini Coopers than can be colored to your affection or a MacBook tailored to a gaming fetish, why not the same amount of attention to a part of your anatomy that bears around 240 pounds per square inch?
Learning how to sew at a young age from her mother, it was the introduction to staging theater that helped her discover one of the last bastions in artisan craft. The almost lost art of making a shoe by hand was part of the attraction, and from the theatrical shoemakers, she learned the basics — cutting a pattern, fitting to a last (a last is a wooden model of a foot). Her first pair of shoes she wore for months in Canada, and she realized the vast separation between a bespoke shoe and a factory one.
In the ‘30s and ‘40s, even factory-made shoes came in different widths, with specification for wide fore heels, but now all of that has vanished and our modern shoes are sized to fit a generic model that is most certainly not our own feet. Daphne realized that comfort and style could not be achieved in a factory scale and she values the process of creation — every single shoe is made to measure and ensured to a client’s foot before a stitch of leather is sewn onto the last. The fit is certainly the most difficult part of making a shoe, which is why she uses a “glass slipper” and mockups to ensure that the feet fit the shoes.
Noting her own limitations, Daphne’s unique approach to her business didn’t use any handbook or manuals for success. For instance, she doesn’t make cowboy boots or riding boots because there is already an intense competitive industry dedicated to both. When she was commissioned to make a replica of Gene Simmons’ boots by a New Jersey KISS cover band, she had turn down the project when managers grew too aggressive about pricing. She stated simply, “I know how much my time is worth.”
Her unique position in the marketplace is that there are simply not many custom shoemakers left, so by hook or by crook, many customers find and give her a steady roster of work. Daphne isn’t a socialite-cum-shoe designer, and she stresses the artisan parts of her craft. View more of her work online at zerkahloostrah.etsy.com.
Issue #35
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more