Shoes
Shoes
Christopher Esber Dresses and Shoes
Christopher Esber founded his namesake label in Sydney in 2010, aged twenty two, on a small loan from his parents. The work is built on deconstructed tailoring and sculptural, negative-space cutting, the kind of engineering that makes a dress look undone and precisely controlled at once.
Roger Vivier Shoes
Roger Vivier opened his own atelier in Paris in 1937 after studying sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, and by 1953 he was designing shoes exclusively for Christian Dior, the first time a couturier ever let a shoemaker's name share a label with his own. In 1954 Vivier is credited with engineering the modern stiletto heel using a thin steel rod for structure, and he went on to design the buckled pump later worn by Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour.
Gianvito Rossi Shoes
Gianvito Rossi launched his own footwear label in Milan in 2006, after years working alongside his father, the shoe designer Sergio Rossi, in the family's factories in San Mauro Pascoli. The house built its name on a handful of disciplined, unembellished silhouettes, chiefly the Gianvito 105 pump and the Portofino sandal, made with the same regional Italian craftsmanship he grew up around.
Bembien Bags and Shoes
Yi-Mei Truxes launched Bembien in 2017 in Brooklyn after six years running marketing for Vogue, following a chance sighting of a stranger's disheveled straw bag on a downtown street. The label works almost entirely through artisan weavers in Bali, treating a basket bag as a craft object rather than a factory good
Valentino Garavani Shoes and Bags
Valentino Garavani opened his own atelier on Rome's Via Condotti in 1959 and formally established the house in 1960 with Giancarlo Giammetti, an architecture student he met that year who became the business partner running the commercial side. The 1962 haute couture debut at Palazzo Pitti in Florence made the house's name almost overnight, and its saturated signature red, nicknamed Rosso Valentino, has stayed a house code ever since.
Chloé Shoes and Bags
Gaby Aghion started Chloé in Paris in 1952, naming the house after a friend because a woman of her social standing was not supposed to have a job. The label made its name by treating luxury as something you could wear off the rack rather than have fitted at a couture house, and it kept proving that with the designers who passed through, from Karl Lagerfeld to Stella McCartney to Phoebe Philo.
STAUD Dresses and Bags
Sarah Staudinger, previously the fashion director at Reformation, launched Staud in Los Angeles in 2015 with business partner George Augusto, naming it after her own childhood nickname. The brand started as a made-to-order customization concept before pivoting to ready-to-wear once customers made clear they wanted the bags and dresses as designed, a shift that produced breakout accessories like the Bissett and Moreau bucket bags.
Phoebe Gates Summer Picks: Everything I Packed and Actually Wore
Everything I Packed And Actually Wore
Bottega Veneta Shoes and Bags
Bottega Veneta was started in 1966 in Vicenza by Michele Taddei and Renzo Zengiaro, two leathermakers who decided the House would never need a logo. The specific thing they built instead was intrecciato, the woven leather technique introduced in 1975 that turned a manufacturing workaround into the label's entire visual language.
Golden Goose Shoes
Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo started Golden Goose in a garage in Marghera, near Venice, in 2000, when they were both in their early twenties. The brand's entire identity rests on a single idea introduced in 2007, the Super-Star sneaker, hand-distressed until it looks like it has already lived a life before you bought it.
Gabriela Hearst Shoes and Bags
Gabriela Hearst grew up on her family's ranch in Paysandu, Uruguay, and after more than a decade working in New York design, launched her eponymous label for fall 2015 built explicitly around sustainability and a long-term view of clothing. The house has stayed close to that premise, from a partnership with the Uruguayan knitting cooperative Manos del Uruguay to a 2017 runway show run on roughly 30 percent deadstock fabric, while Hearst herself went on to lead Chloe from 2020 to 2023 as its first Latin American creative director.
Ferragamo Shoes and Bags
Salvatore Ferragamo trained shoemakers in Hollywood before returning home to incorporate his company in Florence in 1927, chasing better artisans than he could find in America. He spent the following decades engineering the shoe as much as designing it, patenting the cork wedge and steel shank and improvising with raffia and nylon during wartime material shortages.
Givenchy Bags and Dresses
Hubert de Givenchy opened his own Paris couture house in 1952 at just 24, after training under Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet, Lucien Lelong and Elsa Schiaparelli. His debut collection of interchangeable separates in raw cotton shirting, anchored by the white Bettina blouse, made practicality itself the news, and the house's identity was cemented a year later when he met Audrey Hepburn and began dressing her both on screen and off.
Birkenstock 1774 Shoes
The Trending Collection and a New Wave for the Brand
Dries Van Noten Shoes
Dries Van Noten launched his first menswear collection in 1986 in Antwerp, showing it in London with five classmates from the Royal Academy who became known as the Antwerp Six. What set him apart from the group was a refusal to chase a single signature look, instead building a reputation on pattern mixing, botanical prints and a stubborn independence from the usual industry calendar.
Balenciaga Shoes and Bags
Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his first atelier in San Sebastián in 1917, then moved the whole operation to Paris in 1937 once the Spanish Civil War made staying home impossible. What he built there was less about decoration than engineering: the sack dress, the cocoon coat, silhouettes cut with such structural control that Dior reportedly called him the master of the rest of them.
Ann Demeulemeester Shoes
Ann Demeulemeester builds a dark romantic wardrobe from elongated lines, leather, asymmetry and the tension between softness and severity. Founded in Antwerp in 1985 by Ann Demeulemeester and Patrick Robyn, the house grew alongside the Antwerp Six and a deep conversation with poetry, music and visual art. The collection is for dressing with intention, not disappearing into the background.
Christian Louboutin Shoes
Christian Louboutin opened his first Paris boutique in November 1991, in a small arcade near the Louvre, after years spent designing shoes for Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent and a detour into landscape gardening. The whole enterprise turns on one stubborn idea, a lacquered red sole that turns the underside of a shoe into the signature, so a heel is recognizable from across a room before anyone sees the front of it.
Miu Miu Shoes and Knitwear
Miuccia Prada conceived Miu Miu in 1992 and launched it publicly in 1993, naming it after her own childhood nickname and opening its first boutique on Via della Spiga in Milan. The debut collection was cowgirl-themed, fringed suede and patchwork prairie skirts, a deliberate swerve away from the tailored minimalism of the main Prada line so she would have somewhere to be irreverent without diluting it.
The Row Bags and Shoes
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen founded The Row in New York in 2006, after Ashley spent a year trying to design an ideal, no-logo white T-shirt and the pair built it into a seven-piece debut collection that Barneys bought in full. They named it after Savile Row and, for its first three years, gave no interviews about it at all, betting the clothes could carry the label without their names on it.
Le Monde Béryl Shoes
Le Monde Béryl makes shoes for the long way around, with ballet flats, Mary Janes, mules and boots that treat comfort as a design problem rather than a compromise. Founded in 2016 by Lily Atherton Hanbury and Katya Shyfrin, the London label began with the Venetian gondolier slipper as its point of departure. Each pair is hand-finished in Italy, with the kind of detail that reads better in motion than in a product shot.
Prada Shoes
Mario Prada and his brother Martino opened a leather goods shop called Fratelli Prada in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913, selling imported English trunks and travel accessories to the city's elite. His granddaughter Miuccia Prada took over in 1978 and, working with Patrizio Bertelli, turned a nylon backpack into the idea that a utilitarian material could sit at the center of a luxury house.
Maryam Nassir Zadeh Shoes
Maryam Nassir Zadeh opened her Lower East Side store in 2008 and launched her in-house clothing and shoe collection in 2012. Her background in textiles and styling shows up in pieces that make a complete look without looking overworked. The line’s downtown ease is less about minimalism than knowing exactly where to stop.
AMANU Shoes
Amanu makes sandals, bags and belts around a simple idea: everyday accessories should carry the trace of the hands that made them. Founded by stylist Anita Patrickson in 2018, the label works with African artisans and grew from made-to-measure sandals into a wider collection of leather and woven pieces. The mood is tactile, resourceful and quietly connected to place.