Nearly eighty years, one pair at a time
There are shoes you buy and shoes you choose. The loafers, court shoes, lace-ups and sandals that carry the SANGIORGIO name come from the second idea: that one right pair is worth more than three of any old kind. We have them made in Italy, by craftspeople who work leather the way it has always been worked here, and we put them in the window by the same measure we have used for nearly eighty years — if we wouldn't recommend them to a friend, they don't come into the shop.
The first sign that a shoe is well made is in the hand. The leather of a good upper is warm, gives a little under the thumb and comes back; suede has a short nap that changes colour when you stroke it the wrong way. Inside, almost always, a leather insole: the detail nobody sees and everybody feels after a week, when the shoe has stopped being an object and has taken the shape of your foot.
From the flat of one centimetre to the twelve of a platform, the whole scale is here. Not because you need to have everything, but because the woman who comes in on Monday for the office and on Saturday for a party is the same woman, and deserves the same care both times. The same goes for anyone looking for a derby for a wedding and a loafer to wear barefoot in August: two different moments of the same life, and neither is the less important one.
Alongside the shoes we keep the few things that make them last: leather and suede belts, brass shoehorns with the right weight in the hand, cedar shoe trees that scent the wardrobe and hold the upper taut while it rests. They are unfashionable objects and we keep them on purpose, because a cared-for shoe ages well instead of wearing out, and at some point becomes lovelier than it was new.
The shop has been on the main square in Merate since 1947, and the Sangiorgio family still runs it. In nearly eighty years the fashions have changed, the windows have changed and even the way people buy has changed, but the question we ask anyone who walks in has not: where do you need to wear them? Everything else follows from there. To see how these models sit beside the other brands we have chosen, there are the men's loafers and the women's court shoes.
