Credited with nothing less than inventing the stiletto heel in 1954, shoe designer Roger Vivier was hailed in his day as the "Fabergé of Footwear." He collaborated with Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Emanuel Ungaro; created the silver-buckled Pilgrim shoe that Catherine Deneuve made famous in the kinky 1967 classic Belle de Jour; embroidered Elizabeth II's coronation shoes with garnets; and outfitted sex kitten Brigitte Bardot in black vinyl boots.

Still, by the time he died in 1998, Vivier's namesake brand had fallen off fashion's radar screen. So when Italian leather-goods titan Diego Della Valle acquired the company in 2000, he set about trying to find someone who, in his words, possessed "the right talent to reinvent

Frisoni says the primary goal for his debut Vivier collection was to avoid the "archival trap" while staying loyal to the Vivier name. "I didn't want clients arriving and thinking, Here's a Roger Vivier museum!" he says. Thus, in March 2004, when the label's much awaited flagship opened in Paris (in the U.S., the shoes are sold in major department stores), Frisoni showed a Pilgrim shoe, but one that was remodeled with a narrower buckle, a shortened top to show more of the toes, and a new name: La Belle Vivier. The style remains the collection's best seller, and in the opinion of Bergdorf Goodman's fashion director, Robert Burke, it has become the "status symbol on Fifth Avenue."

Prices in the collection range from $445 for the Belle Vivier to $17,650 for a flat, square-toed crocodile boot, and Frisoni suggests, with a sly smile, that those exorbitant figures have worked in the company's favor. "Often," he says, "people think if it's the most expensive, it must be the best." —By Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni