vasilis shoes

My collection of Vasilis Stamatakis Shoes is stored in a huge metal file system in my husband's painting studio. From time to time I go in, move what I must from the chaos that is the Studio to gain access, and re-examine these exquisite works of art. I bought my collection  of handmade shoes over a one and a half year period between 1995 and 1996 in Heraklion, Crete from Vasilis Stamatakis, their designer and maker...

At the time that I chose my particular collection of shoes from Vasilis  I remember being acutely concerned about making the right choices.  Over the years Vasilis  had crafted hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes, and they were incredibly disparate. For eighteen years he completed two collections a year, for a total of thirty six collections - all made in secret.

It is apparent when looking at some models that he was striving to be supremely conservative and at other times you could see that he was feeling very imaginative, even -  in some instances  -  fey.  After any reunion with my beautiful shoes I feel that I did choose well, in that the styles I amassed are quite dissimilar each one from the other. The shoes in my collection were made between late 1941 through 1969 during the time Vasilis also operated his retail outlet - The Elite Shoe Shop -  in downtown Heraklion, Crete.

   
What makes Vasilis' work so unusual are the bizarre circumstances under which his collections were designed and produced.  Although Vasillis had a shoe store and a vast workroom, his high style handmade creations were not for sale - nor were they ever displayed.

So, even though Vasilis owned the equipment to manufacture shoes and had his own private atelier and workshop he pragmatically chose to buy all of his stock from the wholesale shoe manufacturers in Athens  To fulfill the needs of his female clientele at The Elite Shoe Shop, Vasillis traveled twice a year to Athens, visiting the Spring and Fall Shoe Shows to stock up on inventory of the incredibly prosaic and humdrum styles his clients demanded. He did not stock men's shoes at all, although he created innovative styles for his private collections.Some of these men's styles were destined as gifts to his musician friends who performed the rembetiko jazz he so loved.

His not doing men's shoes is ironic because it was his fascination as a child with boot making that brought him to his art.  Vasilis was born in 1916 to a farming family in the mountains outside Heraklion in the village of Agios Paraskavi.  From the very beginning he detested farming and was lucky enough to have a big brother who sympathized with him.  His brother noticed that Vasilis liked to linger around the local boot maker's shop and watch while he handcrafted the black leather boots that are the proudest possession of every Cretan farmer. Thanks to his brother, when it became time for Vasilis to be consigned forever to farming he interfaced with the family and volunteered to support Vasilis while he apprenticed with the village's boot maker.  This apprenticeship lasted for two years and upon finishing Vasilis was able to make a pair of boots that would last the wearer a lifetime.  Needless to say these boots were made completely by hand - hand cut, hand fitted, and most importantly stitched by hand every inch of the way using threads made from pig bristle. On average, a pair of such boots is expected to last at least fifty years.

After this apprenticeship Vasilis' brother agreed to send him into the town of Heraklion for further apprenticeship with an all-purpose shoemaker who also operated a sort of boutique, then called a 'toilette' that also supplied custom made hats, handbags and costumes.  Throughout Vasilis' apprentice years his brother was an absolute tyrant in terms of making sure that he was working very hard.  He would make various guerrilla raids on Vasilis'  room in the boarding house to be sure that he was eating properly and to be certain that he was fulfilling his articles of apprenticeship.  Although his brother was a stern taskmaster he also loved Vasilis and spent virtually all of his savings to pay for his room and board throughout his various apprenticeships. (NB: When I spoke to Vasilis some sixty years after these events, his voice still shook with emotion when he recalled his brother's tremendous sacrifice.)

When Vasilis had learned everything that he could in Crete he set his sights on Athens. You cannot imagine what a big jump this was for a small country boy from the mountains of Crete.  In those days the average villager lived and died without traveling more than 10 or 15 miles from their birthplace.  Only the outrageously wealthy and privileged, of whom  there were very few, ever traveled as far as Athens.  During the next six years or so Vasilis studied through an apprenticeship with a prominent Athenian 'society shoemaker' in order to be able to cater to the tastes of the very wealthy. Exquisite baby shoes, fabulously extravagant wedding and trousseau pumps and even specially wrought footwear for the coffin were some of the specialty items required by the very rich which Vasilis learned to make perfectly. Little by little he worked his way up from shop assistant and  man of all work in the atelier to being a full-fledged Master Shoemaker.

About the time that he became fully qualified, World War II set in. Throughout these terrible years which included the German occupation of Crete and then the terrifically brutal Greek Civil War Vasilis lived in his home village helping with farming and getting whatever shoe related work he could find.  When some relative peace came in late 1941 he realized his dream  of owning his own work room and shoe salon and opened a small shop at the outskirts of Heraklion, near the city gates.

Once he was finally set up with his dream store/atelier he quickly realized that he was operating in an incredibly repressive and reactionary fashion atmosphere that was so very different from pre-war Athens and Heraklion. Vasilis rapidly found that there would be a very small market for extravagant frippery and absolutely no market at all for anything that was in any way unusual.  (The Cretan writer Nikos Katzanzakis knew Cretan tastes very well and wrote at great length about the suspicion harbored by many Cretans against anything out of the ordinary and of their dislike of the fanciful.)

Being a pragmatist, Vasilis worked out a formula for himself that enabled him to make the best of his circumstances - allowing him an outlet for his creativity whilst pandering to local taste and custom.. His shop windows were filled with the mundane sorts of shoes required by the ladies of Heraklion - all of which he purchased ready-made in Athens.  These inoffensive shoes were offered to his clients by suitably submissive and highly conservative female assistants who took care of the day-to-day running of the store.  With his store stocked with what local custom deemed appropriate, Vasilis was free to spend his daily working hours in his atelier where he secretly, season by season and year by year, produced the delicious and unusual footwear that he loved.
 

Fortunately he had a very large warehouse into which, over the ensuing eighteen years, he consigned his spring/summer, fall/winter collections that he made each year solely for his own enjoyment.  His employees were apparently singularly incurious and unusually mum; so to all intents and purposes the community perceived Vasilis as an ordinary merchant.  Vasilis did, however, have a secret life that revolved around the nightclub scene. He was particularly fond of the Greek version of the blues 'rembetiko' - a saxophone oriented low-down sound to be heard in various seedy bars throughout the Levant.  None of these entertainers were native to Heraklion; mostly they came from Athens or Thessalonica; so he found it safe to reveal to them his secret collection of shoes.  Along with the musicians came their inevitable camp-followers and it was Vasilis' particular pleasure to supply his favorites among them with his more outrageous models. He also designed shoes specifically for his favorite musicians - over the top confections that even today draw attention in show business circles. (When I first interviewed V., one of the snapshots that he gave me to copy was of himself and a zoot-suited blues singer standing in front of his shop, circa 1950.He confided that the shoe the musician was wearing was his of his own design and named 'Gin'.)

In 1969 Vasilis decided it was time to retire. His daughter took over his retail space and turned it into a tourist shop.  His warehouse and workrooms which adjoined the shop were locked and bolted, all of the shoes neatly stored in boxes securely stored away on row after row after row of floor to ceiling shelves.

Like many retired merchants Vasilis began to find retirement confining.  In the early 80's he offered to help his daughter with the tourist shop. The tourist trade must have been a totally new environment for him.  His new customers were not the ultraconservative citizens of Heraklion; but rather sophisticated and youthful travelers from all over the world.  He began to learn bits and pieces of different languages -- particularly German and French.  Not only were his new customers imaginative and worldly but: many of them were beautiful young women.  Like most Greeks Vasilis really liked the ladies.  I can only imagine how this sensitive and imaginative man blossomed in his new atmosphere.  I don't know when it was that Vasilis tentatively brought forth from his secret warehouse some of his special shoes.  But I can surely intuit that they were brought out to dazzle young and imaginative foreign women who came to the shop.

In the early 1990s newly arrived on a visit to Iraklion, a place where I have lived off and on throughout my adult life, I found myself suffering from jet lag in the middle of the night. Being unable to sleep I decided to take a four AM stroll around the town.  At that time the shop windows of Heraklion -- aside from the few antiques dealers -- offered very little on the cutting edge. So, you can only imagine my amazement when I saw, in the midst of Heraklion's 'Fashion Sahara', a truly fabulously pair of shoes  displayed incongruously in a main street tourist shop window.

I was at the door of the store immediately upon their opening for business in the morning.  And it was there that I met Vasilis, and it was then that I began to collect his shoes.  Over the next two years I traveled to Heraklion to build my collection of Vasilis' Shoes.  As all of this was going on I was delighted to see that Vasilis was making plans for the opening of a shoe museum to house his creations.  He showed me a huge two page story, printed in the local newspaper in 1995 explaining about this proposed museum. During my visits with him, I got to know him fairly well and he became more and more forthcoming about his life and circumstances.  By 1996 I had collected thirty five pairs of his shoes, taken pages after pages of notes on his life and career, shot hundreds of rolls of pictures of 'my' shoes and had collected various artifacts - newspaper clippings, copies from his personal snapshot collection andsoforth.