In a cobbler’s workshop in Los Angeles, the footprints of Hollywood historical past are stacked flooring to ceiling, watched over by a person who says his occupation is dying.
Yellowing packing containers maintain the lasts — foot-shaped molds — used to create footwear for everybody who was anybody in America’s leisure capital for greater than half a century.
Elizabeth Taylor lies toe-to-toe with Peter Fonda, Tom Jones and Harrison Ford.
In one other stack sit the lasts for Sharon Stone, Liza Minnelli and Goldie Hawn.
Action heroes Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are additionally current.
“There’s a bit of everybody here,” says shoemaker Chris Francis, the custodian of the well-known toes molds.
Francis got here into the gathering just a few years after the 2008 loss of life of Pasquale Di Fabrizio, an Italian cobbler identified in Los Angeles because the “shoemaker to the stars.”
“Di Fabrizio made for everyone, from the casino owners to the actors, the performers in Vegas, Broadway, Hollywood, for film — just anybody you could think of who was performing from the 1960s until 2008.”
Some of the growing old packing containers comprise autographs or dedications from the A-listers.
Others, like these of Sarah Jessica Parker or “Sound of Music” songstress Julie Andrews, maintain drawings from tv or movie productions.
Hollywood was as soon as the perfect place for a shoemaker, says Francis, with its voracious inventive business that churned out a relentless stream of people that wanted to make themselves stand out from the group.
“Celebrities would brag about how much they paid for a pair of shoes, and they would want something that nobody else had,” he stated, flattening a field containing the lasts of Adam West, the actor who performed Batman within the authentic Nineteen Sixties TV sequence.
Francis started his personal couture journey making garments, and was given his first gig after being found stitching a leather-based jacket on a park bench.
“Here in LA, it is easy to be in the right time in the right place,” he laughed.
But it was footwear that he actually wished to create, and started practising in his kitchen at house.
“They were sort of crude at first; I was just teaching myself how to do it,” he stated.
In search of somebody to show him the artwork, Francis traipsed round Los Angeles in search of an internship.
“These guys are all previous Armenian, Russian guys. They’re all from just like the previous world — guys from like Iran, Syria.
“They wouldn’t talk, or they didn’t speak very good English. So you just have to watch and learn, and then just learn by making over and over and over again.”
And should you do not listen, it may possibly all go unsuitable, he stated.
“There’s no forgiveness in a shoe. If you miss a step, if you cut a corner, then the next 20 steps after that might suffer. So everything has to be on point the whole time.”
But in a altering world, such meticulous craftsmanship isn’t all the time rewarded.
Where Burt Reynolds or Robert De Niro may as soon as have been glad to shell out hundreds of {dollars} for a pair of handmade sneakers, the entire business has been turned on its head.
“I’m finding more and more celebrities wanting shoes for free, which is just killing shoemakers like me,” stated Francis.
With his growing old rockstar seems to be, Francis says in darker moments he needs he had taken the recommendation of a few of the previous cobblers who taught him the commerce.
“They told me to go join a band,” he stated. “When I first started, (one man) said: ‘Why in the world do you want to be a shoemaker? They can buy shoes for $20 these days.'”
Francis, 48, says a few of the old-time shoemakers have given up making an attempt to create footwear from scratch, and now simply repair the mass-produced sneakers which have put them out of enterprise.
“As a profession, it’s extremely difficult to survive,” he says.
© 2025 AFP