Good News Shoes
I worked very hard this summer. I had two large project competitions going at the same time. Once the dust settled and they were submitted we then had to wait to hear….hear if we had won the project.
It was hectic at the time and I was putting in long days, seven days a week for months late this summer and fall. It’s always nice to have a “carrot”, a reward in mind. So one day I said: “If we win one of the jobs, I get a pair of Fluevogs.”
If you live in Vancouver you probably know what that means. John Fluevog is a master craftsman, creating gorgeous, playful, and artful handmade shoes and he has an international and celebrity cult following.
I remember in the 1970’s it was Fox and Fluevog for fantastical one of a kind shoes, but ten years later Peter Fox and John Fluevog went their separate ways. John Fluevog renamed the business and focused more on designing shoes. “The company was like a big art project where I could discover more about myself” he was quoted as saying. He continues to create magic making shoes and now decades later has a fabulous flagship store very near the original Fox and Fluevog location in Gastown, a heritage district of Vancouver..
If you know me, you probably know I love shoes. Yeah…I have….a lot… of shoes. Too many I’m sure. But I didn’t have a pair of black and ivory ones…till now.
Early in December my team found out we did win the big care facility project in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. It represents a fair chunk of my project work for the upcoming year. I will be on the team that will take our design to completion over the next year and see that wonderful project become a reality.
And that meant I got to go shopping and buy my first pair of Fluevogs, because I felt I deserved a treat after that good news.
On the origin of this shoe style, with its contrasting heel and toe accents, known as a “spectator” shoe:
John Lobb, the famous English footwear maker, is said to have designed the first spectator shoe in 1868 as a cricket shoe. In the 1920s and 1930s in England, this style was considered too flamboyant for a gentleman, and was regarded as a tasteless style. As it was popular among lounge lizards and cads, who were sometimes associated with divorce cases, a nickname for the style was “co-respondent” shoe: a pun on the colour arrangement on the shoe, and the legal description of a third party associated with the guilty party in a case of adultery. My! What a racy little history note about a shoe!
I am waiting on the results of the other project competition. Wish us luck hearing more good news in January.