Bruno Frisoni
45, Creative Director, Roger Vivier
By Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni
Fall 2005 Style & Design
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
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