The great heeler
Shoe designer Olivia Morris talks footwear with Pendle Harte
Above: Olivia Morris - Photo (C) Keith Sheriff. www.shotbythesheriff.co.uk
Who would you expect to provide the inspiration for a shoe collection? Perhaps a style icon often pictured in beautiful shoes. Shoe designer Olivia Morris, however, is a designer’s designer and doesn’t go for the obvious. Her recent footwear collections have taken Pop Art, Frida Kahlo and Diane Arbus as defining themes. Maybe you wouldn’t immediately associate Morris’s beautiful leather babies with Arbus’s freaky faces, but these shoes are quirky, stylish and artistic without losing wearability and that’s what makes them so covetable.
Olivia Morris has a thriving six-year old business and a shop on Portobello Road. She’s beautiful, smiley and very un-divaish for someone whose shoes are sold in the world’s most stylish boutiques alongside footwear by Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin and priced for the serious shoe spender. The serious shoe spender with very good taste – most of her clients, she says, are powerful and independent women of all ages who work in branches of the arts, a far cry from WAGs in glitzy sandals. These are very much the thinking woman’s high heels (though they’re not, all of them, high) or the artist’s footwear. Shoes with character as well as style.
Olivia’s signature style mixes the old-fashioned with the contemporary in super-feminine reinventions of classic shapes. And there’s always a little hint of the gothic somewhere. The current collection incorporates 1950s shapes in animal print as well as 1980s ankle boots in black and gold, contrasting grey and yellow Mary Janes and deep blue suede kitten heels. There’s a playfulness as well as an edge to this footwear: a pristine court shoe has a clunky chain ankle strap that’s both fetishistic and grannyish, if that’s a possible combination, and each shoe has a name beginning with B, so there’s Bambi, Blondie and Bee.
“Generally I’m obsessed with the past,” says Olivia. “I try not to reinvent vintage too much but definitely my main inspirations come from the 1940s and 1950s. That’s when I would have lived if I could have lived at a different time. My first collection came from circus freaks, tattooed women and rockabillies and I’m still very interested in that sort of thing.”
Olivia’s shoe legacy all started with a tattoo. Graduating from Cordwainers, where she learnt proper cobbling, Olivia braved London Fashion Week with an impressive debut collection that required shoes to be elaborately tattooed. “These days I add a few more commercial pieces to each collection but at the beginning the shoes all used to be quite avant garde,” says Olivia (pre-tattoo, she had been making shoes out of primed artist’s canvas). The tattoo shoes were immediately snapped up by Matches and The Cross and because Olivia had been hand-applying the tattoos to each shoe with painstaking precision, the sudden demand made things pretty tricky.
At first, everything was made in east London but soon production had to be moved to Italy, the true home of the beautiful leather slipper. “Putting tattoos on shoes was the most expensive and time-consuming thing I’ve ever done but it was brilliant because it launched my name,” explains Olivia.
With her size eight feet, Olivia always had trouble with shoes. She couldn’t find ones to fit so was involved in a permanent search, but it wasn’t until her Foundation at Wimbledon that she started designing them. She was specialising in Fashion but wasn’t all that good at it and a tutor suggested she try accessories and immediately it clicked. “I went home and started drawing shoes and it felt so right. Literally overnight I realised what my realised what the future held for me.” She did some work experience with Patrick Cox and spent periods working for Bill Amberg and Katherine Hamnet, gaining an insight into retail that would prove invaluable. And then the tattoo shoe shot her into the world of fashion hype. “It hasn’t been easy and only in the last year have I become not a one man band,” Olivia explains hastily, before it appears that it happened too smoothly. Freelance work for Matthew Williamson, Aquascutum and Preen among others generates some income that goes straight back into the business, and a very successful collaboration with Topshop established her name with a whole new section of the shoe-buying public.
From the start it was Olivia’s obsession with shoes that propelled the business and she will confess to designing primarily for herself and her friends. And of course she always wears her own shoes. “I have a fair few, it would be weird if I didn’t. At the moment I have about 50 pairs out that I wear on an everyday basis but it would be too sickening to count all of them. My mum’s garage is full of more boxes of shoes.” Storing countless shoeboxes is clearly a problem and Olivia solved it by converting a room in her flat into a designated shoe boudoir. “It used to be a tiny kitchen and obviously if I ever sell the flat it’s a single bedroom but now it’s a special shoe room” She will wear several pairs during the course of a day: “flats for cycling uphill, 9cm heels for dinner.”
In many ways it’s the ultimate girlie vocation: designing shoes for a living sounds like an absolute delight but in fact shoes are very technical, far more technical than clothes, says Olivia. “It’s all about millimetres. With clothes you can get away with things because it’s centimetres but with shoes you have to get everything absolutely right or people won’t be able to walk in them.”
After the initial tattoo success, Olivia soon moved into a shop in Portobello Green. At the time she was living in Talbot Road and the location was brilliant, though a few years later she was growing out of it. “The market changed and my business changed.
My clients stopped wanting to come through the market on Saturdays because it was so touristy so I found the Portobello Road shop and it’s been great. Now I’ve got Notting Hill covered I would like to open a proper shop one day. In town.”
Olivia refuses to conform to every fashion whim and is avoiding this season’s ubiquitous platform. Last year’s Spring/Summer collection was influenced by Spain, the tango and Frida Kahlo. There were clashing reds and pinks, polka dots and tango-esque shapes, all easily identifiable. And the current collection is the Diane Arbus-inspired one: “I tried to imagine what her characters would wear so there’s a sexy element, a broguey, preppy element and a bit of everything.”
Next Spring/Summer is based on Alan Jones and Pop Art, and it’s set to be very bright and graphic. Just like the pink neon stiletto outside the shop. Look out for it.