I am a shoe snob. The majority of my footwear is made by Eric Cook, a genius by whom I have had the privilege of being shod for the last 20 or so years, but I had met Giuseppe Santoni a few times and he had impressed me with his attention to detail and the stylish masculinity of his shoes and accessories. So I was delighted to make the trek to the Marche on the Adriatic coast of Italy to visit the Santoni shoe factory.
The Marche is one of the areas that boomed after the Second World War, becoming the shoemaking heartland of Italy, attracting workers from the land, among them a 14-year-old Andrea Santoni who rose quickly to be a factory foreman. By 1975 he was in his mid thirties and, with 20 years’ experience in the business, he decided that he wanted to do things differently.
In the Seventies, the Marche bragging rights between factory bosses were secured by claiming the highest annual production figures, a statement of modernity as opposed to the old slow artisanal ways. But Giuseppe’s father saw a third way, one that was built around quality rather than quantity yet took advantage of the best of both the old and the modern methods. He started his own factory in the garage of his house with five workers.
The best Santoni shoes are about as close as it is possible for a factory-made shoe to get to being entirely bespoke: hand-sewn soles, precious skins, prismatic colour choice, the lot. But as well as this elite section of production there is a full range of men’s shoes from stout Goodyear-constructed lace-ups, through feathery silken slippers and driving shoes made for Mercedes AMG to highly superior sneakers. To bring high-quality traditional shoemaking techniques into the manufacture of sports shoes is eccentric to the point of being slightly insane, but that is the point of Santoni - a level of quality and innovation that exceeds expectations. Quality control is impressive. […]
See on gq-magazine.co.uk
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