In 1938, at Munich time, there had been no employment in the village of Killyleagh in Northern Ireland for twelve years. But in that year, two Czech brothers called Erik, and Gerhard Utitz started in the abandoned flax mill, a branch of the tannery which had been their own family commercial enterprise in Prague when you consider that 1795; exports from Prague had stopped, and this became a try to keep their alternate with Great Britain. A deserted flax mill turned into the best signal that the population had ever lived in anything but absolute poverty.
When Hitler marched into Prague, the Utitz brothers slipped out, forsaking lock, stock, and barrel, taking just one skilled tanner with them. The little branch inside the transformed flax mill has become the principal tannery for Uta suède. The villagers no longer most effective needed to be taught an entirely new form of work; they needed to learn to paintings in any respect: twelve years of general unemployment had bred general melancholy. To desire, at that time, to have 60 professional employees inside years appeared simply a chunk of Utitz optimism, but now 400 women and men paintings on the tannery, coming in using the bus from a ten-mile radius around Killyleagh.
And out from Killyleagh is going suède to all the leading makers of shoes on the Rome-Paris-London style axis. For suède is pervading all of the excessive fashion places. This is partly because of the trend for shoes to match the clothes they wear; suède may be produced within the greatest subtleties of color. Again, it’s far partially due to the femininity of today’s fashions; suède, while crafted from child leather-based, is a smooth, nearly sensual material; flexible, supple, lending itself to the maximum complicated designs for the maximum fashionable shoes.
And yet again, the pervasion of suède is in a few components because of the chrome-tanning technique at Killyleagh, which produces suède containing no resin and with no plastic floor (the foot can, so to speak, breath); and which, inside the new Uta-proof model, is water-repellent – after carrying inside the wet it handiest must be sponged or brushed with a totally gentle brush. Pastel, peach-bloom, and crimson mushroom suèdes made the maximum captivating footwear for this maximum uncharming summertime. Autumn colors are riper, richer: berry red, leaf browns, ripe plums, lush black. Shoes themselves have taken on a medieval turn. There is a hint of medieval Venice in the lengthy, slim escarpin from the Dior-Delman series in Paris; of medieval England inside the town bootee, half-manner between a shoe and a boot, designed by Charles Creed to go together with his autumn collection.
It is a comparatively current development for the London couturiers to collaborate with shoe manufacturers. For his autumn series, Michael designed suède shoes, made through Norvic, with what he referred to as a greyhound appearance – the last phrase and brand new line in tapering slenderness… Toes delivered to a great point, heels to a slender spike. Mattli showed suède footwear he had designed for Saxone in a new bluish-beige Uta shade; Hardy Amies, John Cavanagh, Norman Hartnell, and Digby Morton all designed shoes carried out by way of Rayne, one of the new Associate Members of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers.
Mr. Edward Rayne said himself, curious about the completely clean outlook given to shoe designing by these four dressmakers. They are called the Rayne Couture C0llection and are being produced in a “limited version.” the shoes are actually in the shops, and the clients will want to be fascinated too, for they cost twelve guineas a couple. But for folks who have constrained buying strength, the Miss Rayne Collection at five guineas will warmly commend itself.
Miss Rayne, a legendary charmer, isn’t subject to unreasonable flights of foolishness. Her footwear is quiet and younger, yet contrive to be sensible as well as seductive. There are low-reduce, straight-vamped pumps in brilliant colored glacé kid, with infant Louis heels; and there are city taking walks shoes of tender cork-grained leather-based, with a brogue tongue wrappings over the vamp. And there may be an especially appealing version of the traditional black suède courtroom shoe – or pump, as it’s miles now called. We listen to a first-rate deal about “the little black get dressed” as a vital of every fashionable woman’s cloth wardrobe, but it is the pair of nicely-bred, slender-heeled black pumps which ensures that the foundation of a nicely-dressed appearance is nice and laid.
