With the Rapiécé-Reprisé 2024 collection, Olga Berluti revisits the story of the shoes and clothes that men wear. In a rare interview in 2007, she stated, “I do not dress the foot, I dress the man” and, as a fourth-generation shoemaker – her Italian grandfather Alessandro having established the brand in 1895 – she knows whereof she speaks.
In 2005 Olga Berluti restored to life a tradition male aristocrats in the early 1800s had as a mark of affiliation, namely the finely executed repairs to their garments which crucially, like the Japanese are of kintsugi, were visible to the observer. At the time, she described the shoes as “Very comfortable models, marked by the passage of time, they pay homage to those clothes we’ve had all our lives that we can’t bring ourselves to throw away.”
Bespoke Berluti footwear was favoured by legends such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Pablo Picasso and, perhaps most famously, Andy Warhol, whom Olga met as a teenager in 1962.
The new Berluti Rapiécé-Repricé collection is available in five emblematic Berluti styles. Footwear and accessories come in versions with or without patching.
Another well-heeled fan – in every sense – was Bernard Arnault, who added the brand to the LVMH group in 1993 retaining Olga as Creative Director.
Nineteen years later with the further acquisition of the Parisian Left Bank tailor Arnys, an exclusive menswear offering was created and Berluti transformed into a top to toe destination for connoisseurs of handcrafted luxury.
Despite around sixty own-brand stores worldwide now offering unparalleled tailoring and accessories, it’s still Berluti shoes, and their unique characteristics, that capture the imagination.
The “Alessandro” design created by the founder from a single piece of leather with no visible stitching is an icon of the house, which remains available to this day, while the later introduction of super fine Venezia calf leather allows for such sophisticated effects as “tattooing” (created in association with New York tattoo artist Scott Campbell in 2003) and colour patination where hand applications of dyes and inks by expert colourists turns each pair into unique works of art. There’s even a unique “Berluti knot” inspired by the Duke of Windsor whose grandmother taught him to tie it to prevent his shoelaces from accidentally becoming undone.
The new 2024 Rapiécé-Repricé collection is available in five emblematic Berluti styles with each shoe featuring patching in homage to those clothes which, in Olga’s words, “We’ve had all our lives that we can’t bring ourselves to throw away.”
If that isn’t an excuse for using Dom Perignon as Olga did to polish her fine-grained creations, I don’t know what is.
Author: Maurice Mullen
Show Comments +