Bruno Frisoni, back in person and with collection

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jun 28, 2022

One of the world’s great shoe designers, Bruno Frisoni, made a welcome return with a new start-up, signature collection and look this past weekend in Paris.

 
Though presented during the French menswear season, the collection was entirely for women, with over a score of looks that captured all of Frisoni’s strengths and skills.
 
Bruno’s ideas can vary from mid-century modernism, with echoes of Gio Ponti, to French romanticism, to ladylike minimalism – all of which he accomplished with wit and skill.

His big statement pieces were a quartet of high heels finished with sandal straps and adorned on the side with blooming leather flowers, or even gold foil metal leaves. Fantasy and fun at the same time.
 
Presented inside the gallery of his partner, Hervé van der Straeten, in an airy courtyard deep in the Marais, the collection also included a series of sling-backs and sandals with myriad golden buttons, used ingeniously as decoration or to attach calf-skin straps.
 
For evening, he showed cheetah-print suede boots; a couple of seductive glove leather booties with cut-out toes and lots of flats finished with curvy wide elastic bands.

 
“I approached this like a new brand. I went through my archives and refined some styles, like using elastic, which I have always loved. Making classic shoes but with contemporary embellishments. Making sophisticated but playful,” smiled Bruno, sporting a new monastic haircut.
 
Frisoni began his own collection back in 2000, two years before he became creative director of Roger Vivier, a position he held until 2018. Concentrating on Vivier, he shuttered his own line in 2011, and has now been able to relaunch it as the global slowdown of the pandemic finally fades.
 
This spring, Frisoni showed the collection to buyers, and pop-ups will open in Harrods and Bon Marché this fall, along with US accounts like Ikram and Maxfield and Antonia in Riccione and Base Blu in Varese, Italy.
 
Looking ahead, they are in talks with American department stores and Lane Crawford in Asia.
 
“It’s a start-up and I like that. I want to create a fresh vision for women,” he concludes.
 
Good to have Bruno back.