Together again, energised by joy and purpose. For Spring Summer 2022 Salvatore Ferragamo reunites with its physical fashion audience after 12 months apart. During that time, we have looked to the future with positivity and considered the past with perspective. We have been empowered with fresh eyes and a refreshed appreciation for the fundamental formula of the house.
Our founder combined fearless invention and peerless craft to create beautiful shoes that sparked joy – and along the way became globally synonymous with Italian artisanship and design. This special season we reconnect with that wellspring of the house to present a collection that draws inspiration from the spectrum of beauty and recontextualizes it for a new time: for the now.
Our inspirations are fundamental, perhaps even simple, because they speak the soul. The pleasure of inhabiting a summer afternoon as it slips slowly towards dusk. The shifting natural rainbows of the landscape as the light changes. The sensation of seeing beauty with our own eyes and its delightful percolation into our perspective. The joy of engaging with those around us.
The Show Set-Up:
The historic Rotonda della Besana’s interior is transformed into a space to reflect and reconnect. Mirrored walls and columns allow for both models and audience to see the looks from every angle, and to embrace the joy and visual sensuality of dressing. This in turn reflects one of the defining pleasures of footwear – that of all worn objects, the shoe is the most easily and often appreciated by our own eyes on our own bodies: shoes allow us to see ourselves. The show space becomes a point of optimism, a fulcrum for selfconsideration and reunion with the world around us and our place within it.
Key Collection Details:
Key points include an Italianate rainbow colour-palette natural hues and accents of saturated tones. Aesthetically the silhouettes draw inspiration from a material mid-century mix of 1960s and 1970s cinema and sensually soignée liberation, as well as the functionality of workwear.
Decoratively, the brand has excavated its archives to positively transform worn stereotypes – such as the tiger print – and to pursue Ferragamo’s saturation-refusing mantra. One specific example of this is the collaboration with Parisian artist Julien Colombier that sees a repurposed 1970s Ferragamo floral foulard overprinted on a loose-yarn tiger-stripe jacquard, or fully embroided using an old and typically Italian technique. Impactfully coloured separates in knit and jersey, sometimes fringed, are worn with freedom. Tactile, textured fabrications combine cotton and silk, wool and linen, and hemp.
The Shoes:
Ferragamo icons, the Vara and the Varina, are revived and reimagined in new colourways and materials including rattan. Bohemian clogs – a mix between a Dutch clog and oriental inspired Salvatore Ferragamo signature designs – with contrasting canvas and leather uppers feature the historic double Gancini. The wide-weave hand-fashioned uppers on flat and raised mules recall Ferragamo’s eye-defying ‘Invisibile’ design – these crochet uppers are combined with hand embellished insole and heel.
A new men’s sandal is inspired by an archive Ferragamo sketch of a single-strapped architecturally soaring shoe shape, originally envisioned for women. The classic Tramezza shoe construction is reinvented through subtraction in a deformalised, super-soft loafer.
The Accessories:
The patterns of Ferragamo’s aesthetic heritage is intrinsic to the fabric of this collection. Classic Ferragamo shoe shapes – objects of art – are reproduced in metal jewellery. The Gancini is woven into belt and piping details. Classic Ferragamo bag shapes, including the Ferragamo Studio Bag and the Trifolio, are reimagined in new fabrications and sizings. Vintage-sources silhouettes are revived in radical and surprising new proportions. A brand-new bag in an extremely soft calfskin that can be worn across the body or in the hand.