It is around 1990-91…All seemed well, the shop was in place, orders from great stores from all over the world were coming in, it could not be better, so what could happen?
Well, anything could happen and did happen and like they say when it rains it pours!
It started with the new shop in the Mall which was now officially opened and got a lot of publicity in the papers and TV, and in the beginning a lot of people were coming but after about a year the Mall became a very quiet place and it often looked completely empty. Because of that, many shops were closing which made it even worse and on top the clients were complaining how difficult it was to get there. To park a car was too far away and the Taxis, which is a favorite means of transport in Madrid, could not stop right in front of the building so the people had to walk a small distance but when it rained or snowed the short distance became a long distance. Our clients, of which many were celebrities, were used to stop right in front of the shop and hop in, that was very private and agreeable and they liked it that way. In the Mall they had to go on the rolling stairs and walk quiet a bit in public before reaching our shop and most of them did not like that. The whole deal of the Mall was not that good as it had seemed at first, the rent, which went by the meters (or feet) you occupied, was very high as our shop was pretty big, a quarter of the size would have been sufficient but my mind saw it big with many more things I wanted to design and sell. So even that we ourselves had made the shop out of nothing, we had to pay a rent and the bills of electricity were high, the bills and the interest for the loan of the bank to make the shop were sometimes impossible to pay. It was a hard time and on top of everything the shop in Piamonte had to go because they were indeed going to tear down the building.

There were also very good moments though, very nice people came to the shop, among them Sharon Stone who was filming in Madrid, Gabriel Carcia Marquez with his wife and Pedro Almodovar always had our shoes in his films and so on; but the bills were suffocating us and then… more bad news were soon to be coming our way…

In the meantime the latest collection was in the stores and a new collection was ready to go into production….

wish I had all these now

… or these..

or any of these…

My very favorite

Rocky, the best seller, there were 7 different Rockies and this is Rocky 7

The hairy shoe

In Madrid, wearing my booties and everything else made by me. Alejandro made this picture.

idea for the shop window Puerta de Toledo.

designing shoes

designing clothes

and making pictures of my fav models Alegria and Ava, here in Paris.

and so things were going and moving and changing…

LOVE and PEACE

We are somewhere in the late 80-ties and all is going really well and now that I was adopted by that big factory I had more time to draw and design.

One day Taria showed me a paper that had come in the shop’s mail that was talking about a big project that was on the way to make a super modern Mall specialized in Fashion and Antiques. It was the first Mall in Madrid, or Spain even, in the old town near Puerta de Toledo and the papers were all talking about it. When we read more about it and saw that many of the Spanish Fashion designers had signed up, it started to look tempting to us because you actually had to build the store yourself, there was only the space like a big hole in the ground in a skeleton of a Mall that still had to be build. They were working on it day and night because it had to be finished at a certain time. WOW, now that was a challenge! building your shop from scratch in a record time.
What was I thinking? I felt so good and all seemed to be going so well that I thought I could pull this off- of course counting on the help of my husband Salvador.

For me this was meant to be because my relationship with Taria was a bit deteriorating as we had different opinions and taste so I never could do what I really wanted. Besides,  the building that our shop was in was going to be torn down anytime and so we seriously started to think about it and designing the shop on paper which later had to be checked by a legal architect to make sure it was OK. If the commission agreed you were allowed to start building and they did agree. First thing was to sell my half of the shop in Piamonte to Taria, who sold it to a friend and they would go on doing the shop and be our client.
OK  yes, now we had to start building, a floor, a ceiling and walls as well as put electricity and water. Good for us we had a friend in Algeciras, Emilio, who was a handy man and knew all and everything about building, electricity and water and everything else, he was amazing and agreed to come to Madrid and help us. Salvador and Emilio worked for weeks or months from early morning till night, dusty and sweaty….  what a work it was in the hot summer of Madrid… When I could I also helped but I was also doing the shoes,

the factory, the family and when I think back I can hardly believe we did all that, it was so much work and obviously it was costing a lot of money too. It was going to be quiet a big shop and I should have been more humble and take a smaller one and do things very simple.. but I was going and was going too fast… there was no way of stopping me….

So finally… our shop in Puerta de Toledo

They also photograped our shop for a book called : “100 great looking shops”.

In the meantime Alegria went to school in Madrid but here she is visiting Ava in Paris where I took this picture of this 2 super models. Alegria wears my jacket ( see picture above this one) and Ava wears a dress her mother, Cooky Debidour, made for her. Alejandro was now completely in charge of the new shop doing a great job.

                                           LOVE AND PEACE

ALEJANDRO in the 80-tiesThis post I like to write about Alejandro van Rooy, our son, who was born in Canada and traveled with us all over the world and lived in many different places. He now lives and works as a designer in Madrid (Spain), but in the 80-ties when we had our shoe factory, Alejandro came to work with us. He liked it and was very good at it, learned all the aspects of making a shoe and was for me a great inspiration and a wonderful help. It was very important for me to have someone around who immediately understood and had the flair to come up with solutions. Being a great designer himself, he designed several models of shoes under my name and at a point even had a small line of his own … His ideas are always way ahead but yet so classic, nothing like my baroque designs, he is rather a minimalist but very definite Alejandro, which is classic with a  twist. When he was little he drew already so well, whole stories with incredible details and plenty of things happening, he loved to read dictionaries and could make maps of any country in detail when he was only like 8. In other words a funny boy with lots of talent for drawing and designing. When he was 17 and tired of going to school he came to work with us in the shoe factory in Elda and later moved to Madrid to take care of the shop, together with Taria, and would come over to Elda some weekends. In the end we all moved to Madrid and instead of having to take the train from Elda to Madrid and back, we now took the train from  Madrid to Elda and back when it was necessary.

Alejandro also took very nice pictures of Alegria and of me and of the shoes and plenty of drawings……      so let me show you some of his work…

here he uses his own logo “Alexandrovitch”

This was the first shoe he designed (1983) and we produced. The model was called “Alejandro ” and sold well.

The shoe is a design by Alejandro as well as the picture. Here he photographed his shoe on the head of the display doll they made of me, (I made the hat). This picture was published in a book about shoes ” Haute pointure” by Colin Mc Dowell.

this is a double page in the Spanish Vogue with a booty of golden linen with black suede decorations that is a design by Alejandro

The shoes with the red line around them are designs by Alejandro, they were very successful….

Alejandro made the most wonderful color sample books for us…

… or this funny invitation for our sales in the store… all the girls wearing our shoes and bags…

… his designs for buckles and studs…

his always very elegant designs…

with lots of humor….

Photographing his sister Alegria  1991?

  or me, here in Madrid showing my “leaves” jacket…

…working in the shop….

and here you can read a great interview of Alejandro by Raquel Cristobal (Gratis Total)

… and have a look at his blog, The Pilgrim or see more of his illustrations:

well friends, next time we go on where we left off in Madrid,

LOVE and PEACE

1985-86-87… Where the idea to open up a shop came from I don’t remember but the time was right! We were selling very well in Spain, specially in Marbella, Ibiza and Barcelona. The thing is that these shops sold a few of our models, some over and over again…

like the “Saphir” sandal which was very popular in Marbella, Ibiza and Los Angeles, especially in Gold or silver leather, in all different heels, from high to flat. A real best-seller.

        Summer collection…

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that in your own store you can do what you want and put a whole atmosphere there which is your own, display all the ideas you might have for all to see and eventually buy… and there it was: a telephone call from Madrid! A lovely young woman from Finland by the name of Taria who lived in Madrid and was the wife of Ivan, a very popular Spanish Pop star.

Tony, our favorite seamstress with a poster of Ivan which he signed for her.

She wanted to talk to us and propose something, very interesting. They came for a visit and we talked. She really wanted to put up a shop and sell all our things, which is great but I could not have her have all the say, so after negotiating back and forth we made a 50/50 deal.

 Invitation for the opening of the shop…and what they wrote about it…

this picture was made in Madrid by Andre Rau for the STERN magazine…

 This meant we each paid half of all the costs, lease, rent, bills, keeping up, sales salaries and stock and we shared the profits of the sales in the shop. We as manufacturers made the normal  profits on what we sold to the store as we did by selling to other stores. Taria had quite a lot of freedom to order the models and colors she wanted which was not always the same as my own ideas but she was the person in the store and very dedicated and I even believe she found the shop which was an amazing deal in a district that was coming up as the Avant-garde fashion center of Madrid, it all is certainly “high end” there now! It was a sort of fallen down building, out of order and waiting to be torn down in that street named Piamonte. It had a marble front with a small but very chic window,

and a very nice door, the rest was a ruin but full of possibilities. Taria and I had slightly different taste so concessions had to be made, I particularly remember the floor because I wanted it to be wood but Taria wanted black stone which with our Kilims on top looked great and the store looked fabulous when we had finished with it. I even had a mirror put on one of the ceilings so you  could see what the shoes on your feet looked like seen from above while sitting down.

The shop worked great, Taria was there every day and Alejandro moved from Elda to Madrid and worked in the shop which was very important because we could really trust his taste and he knew all about the fabrication as he already had worked with us for the past few years, he even had his own line and designs will.

Salvador made this gorgeous painting of me specially for the store, all in black and white except for the belt, bracelet and the blue shoes ( which you can’t see here).

Blue Jean collection

We were still living in Elda which was quite a way from Madrid, 4 hours by fast train, which was never fast but at times I went there to see how things were going and stayed with Alejandro in his flat or with our friend Sylvia Polakov, famous fashion photographer who has a wonderful place overlooking the “Retiro” park. Once the shop was working really well and we had a lot of interesting clients from the world of movies, fashion and music that visited our shop from everywhere and as far as from LA to Chile or Columbia, Holland, France or Africa, I introduced a small collection of clothes which was being produced in Madrid

And now…. I was going to have to go there more often

Alegria visiting Versailles during a trip we made to Paris, her dress and shoes are made by me and she looked so pretty there….

Alegria visiting Ava Hervier for the summer holidays

LOVE and PEACE

                                                                      Photo for Spanish Elle by Sylvia Polakov 1985

It all starts with a drawing which is than classified and numbered, number of form or pattern and all other information that comes to mind……

Besides shoes I loved to draw a whole collection of clothes around the shoes.…some I would make for myself

… and when a friend of Alejandro, Clementine who lived in Paris, daughter of our friend Fanchon, passed by to spend some time with us in Elda, we got her all made up and dressed with my clothes and she let me take pictures of her on the terrace of our house in Elda. Alejandro did most of the styling and I think she is absolutely beautiful!

 Velvet coat, velvet boots …

 Bright emerald green silk tafeta blouse, blue suede skirt, black and gold belt,  soft leather booties…

 black leather top, belt with studs and stones and different metallic leather flats…here Clementine with Alejandro

Pity this is in Black and white as the colors were dazzling, all in the purples and gold…

The house in Elda where we finally landed was a wonderful house we rented from Maria, an eccentric old lady who had spent her whole life in the shoe biz. It was right on the outskirts with a terrace overlooking the mountains where we used to go for walks with our Afghan hound ” Kabuli”. We now had completely moved out of “El Cuarton” in Cadiz and lived full time in Elda and the country house in Aguas de Busot. The beautiful “Nido del Aquila” on top of the mountain got sold with our help and the Muñeca was now taken care of by friends. We had to be in Elda all the time because the business was getting serious and needed all of our attention and also there had to be some stability for the kids who had to go to school and so on. We had a marvelous girl named Paqui who would come everyday and cook and clean and take care of Alegria when she came out of school…

It was a very good time….

LOVE and PEACE

Oh, How wonderful to be making shoes, loved every minute of it although it was not always wine and roses.
The production was more or less in place so now the selling was the most important and in order to do so we had to get known  in the shoe store world. So after we did the shoe-fair in Elda…

which was very successful, we decided to do the NY Fashion Fair with our shoes and belts

Alejandro brought us to the airport.…

We were received in style in NY.  Samina, the Pakistani princess  and owner of the Nido del Aquila, came to pick us up at the airport in a white Rolls Royce, wearing an incredible white fur sitting there beautifully in the white leather seats.… ha, ha she was too much.… you should have seen her home, all minimalistic super modern Italian furniture, it was indeed nice to see her and we promised we would do our best helping her to sell her house in Spain….

By now we had quiet some clients in the US, all wonderful stores, and we got some nice press in the Woman’s wear daily and some other magazines

The “Faust”

” La Española” designed by Salvador…

Carmen Maura, famous Spanish movie-star with my Rockies in Blue

In order to keep the factory busy between the time we made-up the models, did the selling, prepare the orders, order the materials and so on, there was a gap in which I had to keep the seamstresses and cutters busy, the shoemakers took much longer and they had always something to do and most of them were temporary workers anyway but not the seamstresses and cutters… so I started to make belts and mittens and finally bracelets of leather incrusted with studs and stones. We sold those like Hot cakes!
The first sample I always made myself and the happiest moments of that time was to be in the factory at night after everybody had gone home, sometimes with Salvador, sometimes with Marianni, sometimes alone, everything at hand, leathers, studs, stones, machines and everything else to design and make up whatever came to my mind, nice music, a good joint, that was heavenly to me.

The mittens, ( muñeceras)

Of course there were many things that were not so heavenly. Some clients would not pay at all, others would let us wait for months and considering that a phone call to the US was $1.50 a minute at that time, it nearly ruined us. That’s why it was a very happy moment when a girl, Vesna, whom I had befriended at Yves Saint Laurent where she was a model, called me out of the blue and told me that she was shopping for shoes in NY and bought a pair of mine but did not realize they were mine until she got home and saw my name… Now Vesna wanted to represent us in America and Vesna was just perfect, looked great, had good taste and was really ready to go for it.

Now the whole setup changed and from now on we got the orders directly from Vesna, she paid us, than took care the shoes got to the stores and that’s how she got paid. It was much better and our list of American clients grew. We bought a Telex, the computer was still pretty unknown and only very big companies had them, so we had now a Telex, the next best thing, which often woke us up in the middle of the night when the orders of the US were coming in with a lot of noise.

In the meantime we decided to rent an apartment in Elda so we did not have to stay in hotels . It was not a very nice apartment but at least we could make our own food. One day when we were driving around to discover the area we found this incredible place called ” Aquas de Busot” . We saw these beautiful abandoned houses and so we asked around in the nearby village where they gave us the name of the woman who was taking care of them. It was swift and happy for both parties, we could rent the house for something like $50 a month… Wow, what a place. It was pretty old and had plenty of rooms. I think the servant quarters were down stairs, an enormous entrance with a fire place so big we could all stand in there and in the days was used for cooking and a room and a storage place, upstairs were the living room and the bed rooms and bathroom.

The house stood in the middle of beautiful woods where no one ever came, with here and there another abandoned house, all big and beautiful and in the middle of the woods was a small castle, so pretty as I never saw, not even in movies, could very well imagine the Romeo and Juliette scene there on that beautiful balcony. We met the people who owned it, they came down occasionally in the summer when it was too hot in Madrid and  they showed us the place inside. Some parts of the castle were build in the 14th century and left original. It was perfect and in use, with gorgeous carpets and furniture, can you imagine? In the middle of nowhere? They thought nothing of it, it had been in the family for centuries.

Alegria in Aquas… all the tiled floors were so beautiful….

The sanatorium painted by Salvador Maron.

There was also a Sanatorium, abandoned since the 40-ties but had been a very popular place for people with breathing problems. It was a small village by itself with many different buildings, lamps from the 30-ties hanging abandoned from the ceiling, wooden cabinets of all shapes and lots of “Tonnet” chairs, real ones, signed and all and this incredible marble stairs and bath tubs and floors, unbelievable. We had a lot of fun spending time there.

So lets see, now we had 4 places to live and for some reason we also had 4 cars. The Landrover from the “Nido”, the beautiful SEAT Salvador bought in Elda,

Salvador and the SEAT.. wearing a silk sweater by our friend EDINA RONAY

A BMW we had bought from a friend who needed to sell and a Buick, the only one Automatic and that was the one I was driving and as a matter of fact that was the car we drove down to Paris with to show our shoes there. Salvador had had this smart idea to rent a suite in a wonderful Hotel “Lotti” in Paris and invited the clients to come and visit us there rather than having a cold stand in the fair. We had such a good time and the clients were delighted to be received with champagne in that relaxing atmosphere

Things kept constantly changing. Alegria should go to school and Alejandro could not stay that much by himself as we were going more and more to Elda as that was where it all was happening. We are now more or less in 1985-86 and I am getting still deeper into shoes….

LOVE and PEACE

That was it! Francisco had found us a small Factory that was for rent! Wow, Our own factory! It was very old but everything was there, some incredible machines that looked really alien and too old to use but everything we needed for our handmade shoes worked. It was amazing because the rent was not much and it was perfect for us.

Well, here we were again cleaning up as good as possible and painted the office blue-green so one had the feeling to be in the water.

… Through the window from the entrance to the office

It was quiet a setup, we had to get people to make the shoes for us, a pattern maker, cutters, seamstresses, the shoe makers, (each specialized in his thing and machine, to keep the chain going and a girl to finish the shoes, 2 or 3 young assistants, someone for the office and someone to drive around and organize and pick up things (Francisco) and a manager to keep an eye on everything. Then there was us, Salvador the M.A.D. director and me the M.A.D. designer

and Mariani Vermeend, who had come from Holland with a friend for a visit and stayed, she was my right hand so to speak. We had placed an add in the paper and had job interviews, many people came and some got the job. Important for me was to find a seamstress who would understand me and I did! A young girl, her name was Tony. She was really incredible and eager to learn, she stayed with us through thick and thin and of course became the head seamstress. We saw her fall in love, getting married and having babies.    It was great to be in the factory , nice atmosphere, nice people and some were curious and liked what they were doing and knew they were appreciated by us and would do anything for us, like working sometimes to very late at night because things had to go…

Yes, Spain was wonderful, I love Spain and Elda was great, the nice weather, the beautiful mountains with an old castle here and there in the background, the factory and every thing one needed almost at hand… I say “almost” because at times I had to compromise for different reasons, it could be because of the great expenses, a new mold for a heel had to be made up by hand ( first cut in wood and when it is right they are made of plastic and sized to all sizes) so if I designed a special heel it was very costly to make up the molds unless you sold thousands of them which was not our case, we were just starting. But they had thousands of heel samples you could choose from of which the molds already existed, some from back in the 50-ties, all kinds of heights and shapes and there I had to compromise and get an existing one that was as close as possible to the one I had in mind. Later we were able to make up  more things like settings for the stones we found or ornaments to decorate the shoe, like buckles and chains, heels and platforms.

In the meantime I worked with the wonderful things available, Spanish brocades which were a specialty in Alicante as they use it for their traditional costumes they prepare once a year when they have something like a carnival. The good ones were hand woven and absolutely gorgeous.

One version with low heel…

.… and a higher heel (picture appeared in a magazine)

I also loved the old “mercerias”, stores where they sell ribbons and pasmanteria and tassels and other wonderful stuff, they often left me go to the back room where they kept all the things from years back, buttons and buckles and silk or plastic flowers …

Next thing we had to make the Logo,

the labels, the boxes, the cards and when all that done there was the “Elda Shoe Fair”  Hire a stand, decorate and invite as many people as possible. Most visitors were from Spain but from all over and some American buyers and press. That’s how we got our first clients and the factory started to work.

The factory, above left: Tony and right Tony with other seamstresses, a cutter, me with Olvido a young assistant, below Olvido, Marianni, me and Salvador and the last one, the shoemaker Paco and the manager…

By now I had learned a lot about shoes and could make myself a pattern or at least collaborate with the pattern maker as that is a real job and I had 1000 other things to do.

The “Lautrec” black suede with Golden wings

Me wearing them…

and a different version.

we convinced a leather company to print these leathers for us

and made belts of the pieces that were left over, you could snap them any way you wanted and make it once, twice or three times go around the body….

We were still driving up and down from Alicante to El Cuarton and back, always staying in a Hotel in Elda or Alicante, which was half an hour drive from Elda but was worth it, more comfortable in front of the beach with nice restaurants around. The fish there was so good… But there is no place like home  and being with the family was very important.

Alegria having a picnic with Kabuli our dog. We found Kabuli as a baby abandoned in a gas station, he was beautiful. A few years later he was killed by a shepherd when he went after a herd of sheep and never having seen an Afghan hound the shepherd got scared and shot him…

Alegria and Alejandro at home…

on the roof of the Muñeca, with Alegria, posing in my designs…

Marianni stayed with us and was a great help with all the work and we had fun too. Always remember driving from El Nido  to Elda in her open red Porsche through the mountains in the sunshine with the wind blowing in the hair and the music on…

 It was an exciting time, it was wonderful, we were lucky!

My Husband Salvador spend most of his time helping me in the business so he could paint less but still did some wonderful work,Next time we get deeper into shoes….

LOVE and PEACE

Oh, sorry it took so long to get back to you but we were packing and moving from Oregon back to Los Angeles. We have lived in Oregon in this ” middle of nowhere,” wonderful place called Sherwood, between Pine trees ( Douglas Fur) and friends, surrounded by fruit trees and flowers, for almost 3 years and now we felt like moving back to LA to be with our daughter and her family. A new adventure…

In the meantime in my story we are still in 1983-84. Can you imagine the 80-ties? The “House”. The “Funk,” the “Disco,” the “Saturday-night fever,” the Grunge, the big shoulders, enormous earrings and boots in all lengths, style and shape.

For us things got more serious and more complicated. Here we were on top of the mountain somewhere in the very south of Spain where now we had 2 big houses to take care of. La Muñeca was a beautiful house and huge! 13 bedrooms and different other rooms on the roof and an enormous cellar full of beautiful hand-painted Spanish ceramic plates and bowls of all sizes, which were there because the owner had ordered 1 set of each but they had delivered 6 sets of each and now they were stuck there.

La Muñeca ( The Doll) seen from the end of the pool and from where there was a glorious view of Africa  ☞

This is our first business card,drawn by Salvador with the name of our company which was”MAD”sl. MAD was standing for “Multiple Art Designs” or Money.Argent.Dinero.

Picture of Salvador in the “Pool” studio with a shoe of the first collection called “star”

Postcard we made from one of the pictures which we send out to a lot of shoe-stores to invite them to the Elda Shoe Fair. Well, this was all fine and wonderful but in the meantime we lived far away from Elda, Alicante, and not only that but it was very hard to stay in contact. There was no telephone in either of the houses ( cell phones did not exist then) so if we wanted or needed to make a call we had to go all the way down the mountain and be lucky if someone was in the “office” to let you in and let you make a call and then if we were very lucky we got Francisco on the phone. This was all a bit of a problem but we trusted them and thought they knew what they were doing.

First collection as they arrived in their white boxes…

We found a school for Alejandro which was quiet a way away, down the mountain early in the morning and take the bus, in the afternoon up the mountain and so if we were not there  he had to walk both ways and because we had to be away at times we needed a girl to take care because we were too busy. We found a lovely country girl, Maria Jose, a healthy strong young woman who could cook and everything else, it was nothing for her to kill a chicken or walk up the mountain every morning as she did not want to stay overnight unless it was really necessary, like when we were going to be away for a week and Alejandro could not stay by himself there in that big house of course.

Poster Salvador made, we sent those to all our clients to put in their store…

Now we had to go to Elda more often because the samples were ready and we decided to make up a certain amount of pairs in different sizes of each model so we would have a stock in case we started selling. Actually the factory that was making the shoes for us just needed work and convinced us that that was the way it was done, which was and is of course not the case. You make the models, take the orders and only then start the production. But as we were new to this and innocently believed what they were telling us, we had them make up a “stock”. OK, but now what? Where to put all these shoes? To have them brought up all the way to the top of the mountain seemed extreme and costly so we rented an office space in the town of Algeciras, the nearest city. OK, an other place that needed to be cleaned, painted and made ready so we worked hard and got it to look great, we even had our own telephone now so we were in a much closer contact with Francisco in Elda and one fine day we received the first shipment of shoes, big boxes full! We did not have our own shoebox designed yet so they were all in white plain shoeboxes but we could not believe our eyes when we opened them. Usually each shoe is filled up with silk paper folded to keep the shape and then each shoe is individually wrapped in some more silk-paper. Well, these that we saw in the boxes were to our astonishment wrapped in kitchen-towels and filled with toilet paper! Honestly, quiet “avant-garde” really, but not our style and there we understood that it had to be totally in our control otherwise anything could happen and did happen.

with Alegria, checking the production…

In Alicante on the way to our Hotel… both dressed by me, the sweater I knitted in Paris and the leather pants I think are still from NY. Alegria’s dress was recent, I made most of her clothes and she was my best model…

One day the girl who worked in our office a few hours a day, wanted to wash her hands but there was no water, something that happened often in Algeciras at certain hours, but she forgot to close the tab and went home and sure enough the water came back… Next day when we came to the office and opened the door we could not believe our eyes, it really was an unbelievable sight to see all these boxes floating in the water that had been running all night. Well, this was a real disaster and we realized we had to do the whole thing differently and came to the conclusion that we somehow needed our own factory so we could control the quality and the timing because it was very important things got sent to the clients in time and they all wanted it NOW!

Golden Rocky, the al-time favorite, sold it over and over again…  background picture by Laurence Sackman

If there was a lot of work you could hire freelance shoemakers  of which there were many in Elda and everything would be controlled by us and our leathers would not get mixed up any longer, something that happened when we had our shoes made up by an other factory, they would use my beautiful leather lining for their shoes while they used their hard ones for mine… or they would put the wrong heel, or burn the leather, did not finish them (the finishing touch is important) thats when the shoes are checked, cleaned, brushed, wrapped and put in the boxes, but at times they were in such a hurry that they put them in the boxes without finishing.. We discovered this by accident! They had no idea that these shoes were going to the hottest ¨chic¨ stores.

Working in the Muñeca studio.

Anyway, we asked Francisco to look around and see what he could come up with and it did not take too long……

LOVE AND PEACE

Here we were in that beautiful place and with the possibility to set up a business of my liking and I had decided it was going to be shoes. Actually I knew little about shoes, for sure love them and I had designed them for YSL and sometimes had my own designs made up by a shoemaker but that’s as far as it went.
Now, where to start? It was 1982 and there was no internet we could consult but we discovered that Alicante, a Provence at the coast quite a long way from where we were, was the place where the shoe industry was located and there, a few miles from the city of Alicante, was a small town called Elda that concentrated totally on shoe making. Some other little towns and villages made shoes too but Elda was bigger and had the best reputation.
One morning we all got in the land-rover and we were on our way, a beautiful but very long drive through the high mountains and country roads. It was so far that if we left early in the morning we arrived late at night but that first trip we stayed somewhere overnight because we wanted to arrive fresh and early in Elda to investigate the situation. We went to have breakfast in town and made a telephone call ( No cell phones in that time) to the first shoe factory we saw in the Elda telephone book. Salvador explained, of course in Spanish, to the director who came to the phone, what we were looking for and he advised to call someone called ‘Alverado’ and invite him for lunch in the Elda country club, he probably could help us further. That was indeed a funny meeting, the food very good and we learned a lot. Alverado was the most advanced designer and had his own factory where he made his own line which was successful and after we explained again what we wanted to do he asked if we had our ” Hormas”? Horma is the spanish word for “Mould” or “Last” in the shoemakers language, which is a wooden or plastic form on which the shoe is moulded and mounted and which decides the shape of the shoe and the height of the heel and the width and the comfort… so indeed very important. No, no we had no moulds and it turns out that each model needs a mould and the first thing to do was to go and visit the mould makers and choose some form that would go with the designs I had prepared. We started with the one that Alverado had advised us and to our astonishment there were thousands and thousands of moulds to choose from, so many that at first it makes you dizzy but later you get used to it and you know better what you want. In the end we decided to have our own made up and so we went to the best mold crafter in Elda and had him make up 2 basic forms, 1 for high heels and 1 for flats which he made to my foot so I could fit the models.

      One of our forms

Extensive days looking for leathers and other things to do with shoes….

All this took days but in the meantime there was a lot to discover and at every step we were sent to the next and after visiting several factories we found Francisco. He was the son of ” Montesinos” a well known shoe-factory owner in Elda, but Francisco himself was working around in different places and someone had made him attentive to us and he spoke English!!! It was sometimes hard at that time to express myself exactly in Spanish so the fact that he spoke English and knew every corner of Elda made us take him in as our manager.

… with Francisco Montesinos trying out our first models…

Although Elda had everything a shoemaker needs, it was very basic and there was very little fantasy. Could not find the soft Gold leather I was looking for and it had to be soft and comfy… here I got a lot of protest of the shoemakers in the factories because they were not used to doing anything different and wanted to stick to the traditional way… Also I was a woman and believe it or not in that time still something not heard of much in that little Spanish town. So because everything was so basic I had to invent little things that would make them special, so we painted the leather made holes and made them all as soft as possible but of the best quality materials.

The softest of boots….

 The Gladiator

 Red Rocky, so well fitting, making a beautiful leg….

Venus, a best seller …

The painted leather….

We did a lot of work and after spending some time in Elda it was always great to come home and enjoy the pool and all the wonderful things there…

Back in “El Cuarton” we were now known to have resurrected the little castle and had done such a great job with the house that we were asked to take care of an other house that was empty and was next to ours… This house was much bigger then the Nido so we decided to make that place our  working space….

We go there next time but for the moment you can see what Salvador is doing in Alegria’s blog, Click HERE☜

 LOVE and PEACE