This shoemaker is handcrafting traditional
Victorian footwear — in modern-day LA.
It's an age-old craft that Vicky D'Incecco has kept alive
in a world of fast fashion and mass manufacturing.
As far as she knows,
she's the only Victorian shoemaker left in the US.
One of my life projects is to try to recreate
those silhouettes that we found in that era
with those curves, and the curvy arch,
and just all the curves.
Vicky brings her designs to life
by using mostly antique tools she managed to find on eBay.
When you look at a shoe off the shelf
at a random retail store, generally
maybe they're not real leather,
or the shank is made of cardboard,
or the stiffeners are very commonly made of plastic.
The shoes can sometimes take up to
three weeks to make.
There's very repetitive processes
where you're sanding things.
That can take a very long time because you go through
several layers of sanding to get
a really nice, smoothed edge.
In my case, I make everything by hand.
So everything's hand-cut,
and then I stitch it in a sewing machine,
it's not stitched by hand.
But then it is fully assembled by hand,
handcrafted, sanded, and all those details.
Leather varies. Some leathers needs to be sprayed.
Some are more malleable.
This one needs to be sprayed.
Vicky first started her career as a designer
for an Italian shoemaker and worked directly with factories.
She was so curious and passionate about the process
of making a shoe that she decided to learn for herself.
So I started researching through blogs and books
and taking advantage of the wonderful shoemakers
who share their work online.
Eventually I ended up working with a shoemaker locally
that I could fine-tune my skills with.
Vicky has clients in the US, Singapore
and Japan, and they mostly find her through Instagram
and YouTube.
She spends a lot of time taking pictures, filming
videos of her process, and even editing them herself.
I actually did this a little bit differently.
I went ahead and I blocked it. Because of the design
with these cuts on the sides,
we obviously wanted to make sure
they don't stretch too much.
I am making a living out of it.
So basically the way that I do that is I'm able to work
on several shoes at the same time,
because they're all basically at different parts
of the process.
Orders obviously come in as very sprinkled,
and it depends on the person and the time of year.
I do a lot of wedding shoes and things like that,
that are like, more special occasions as well.
Even though Vicky's shoes sell for around $800,
her business did not take a hit during the pandemic,
thanks to a sweeping change in the retail world.
I know that fast fashion is creating a big problem
and everybody's sort of waking up to the fact
that fast fashion is damaging the planet,
and it is not well made, so therefore it doesn't last you
very long. I know a lot of people learning new crafts
and things like that,
just so that we can sort of get back down to a place
where we're consuming less, but we're consuming better.
And while Vicky only made 14 pairs so far
this year, each one allows her to go back in time
to the Victorian era.
So I don't romanticize the past in the sense
where I necessarily wouldn't want to live then,
because obviously things are better now — socially,
politically, all that stuff —
then it was then, especially as a woman.
But in terms of the fashion and the architecture
and the music, I just, I love it.