Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams Review: A Routine Tribute to a Legendary Shoe Designer

Expectations are inevitably high for a fashion documentary made by a director such as Luca Guadagnino, simply because such films barely have any effect beyond public relations. The title of Guadagnino’s Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams alone closely mirrors another ancillary marketing spectacle, the recent “Christian Dior, Designer of Dreams” exhibition. Because fashion-centered works like these too often veer toward homages to the expert hands of genius European men rather than toward critical reflections that might expose fashion as yet another toxic dimension of late capitalism, you may ask yourself: Could a filmmaker of Guadagnino’s caliber save the fashion documentary from its hagiographic propensities?

Shoemaker of Dreams starts off as though it could do just that. Guadagnino brings a sense of seriousness to the film by introducing a slower pace, and a quietness, that’s foreign to films such as Halston, House of Cardin, Manolo: The Boy Made Shoes for Lizards, and, the more successful of the bunch, Martin Margiela: In His Own Words. Through precious fragments of an extremely low-quality audio interview with Salvatore Ferragamo himself, who died in 1960, conventional talking heads (mostly white people with aristocratic faces), and archival footage of the 20th century, an aura of gravitas is achieved mostly because Guadagnino situates the life of Ferragamo not only as a tale of personal success, but an entry point for a lesson on the magical possibilities—entrepreneurial, industrial, and cinematic—and disillusionments of the 1900s.

The film’s rags-to-riches narrative follows the extraordinary life of a humble boy born in the late 1800s who manages to jet-set around the world from poverty-stricken Bonito (a small town some 55 miles from Naples) to the most glamorous echelons of Hollywood through his passion for shoes, technical brilliance, commitment to marrying aesthetics with comfort, and sheer grit. Ferragamo endures the harsh conditions of crossing the Atlantic to eventually design shoes for the likes of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and Rudolph Valentino. He also works in film costuming with Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith. The Great Depression forces Ferragamo to do some soul-searching and bring back to Europe the skills and business acumen that he developed in the United States.

The film thus succeeds in draping a sort of genealogical flesh around otherwise loose signifiers such as “Ferragamo,” which remain empty for a general public that sees them as names without history stuck on luxury goods. Shoemaker of Dreams also provides much-needed historical context for fashion to be understood as a series of everyday practices and technical developments intimately intertwined with virtually every cultural industry throughout time.

But along the way, Guadagnino’s commitment to an original approach evaporates. The film settles into the most conventional form of the fashion documentary, covering over tragedies or any glimmer of criticism with sentimental accounts of either those who knew Ferragamo or, at least, his brand’s ethos (from his children to designers Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin) and those who don’t seem to know much about Ferragamo or fashion at all.

These latter figures seem to have been included due to their expertise in cinema or curatorial practices. Filmmakers, film critics, and even a “bioengineering historian” appear to shed light on, among other things, Ferragamo’s studies of foot anatomy and the ergonomics of footwear, which reached their apex in the designer’s iconic cage heel, whose thin wires came together to make a solid heel, and his “invisible shoe,” made up of nylon threads on an F-shaped edge. The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.