The idea that women’s shoes can be both fashionable and comfortable is a foreign concept to many in the fashion industry, but Anyi Lu is working to make it a reality.
A chemical engineer by training, Lu attempts to bring a sense of practicality to a field that relies more on aesthetics than function. Her other passion is ballroom dance, which she did competitively, so she also knows what works and what doesn’t when it comes to footwear that pounds the floor.
“I’m proud to say that the collection is engineered,” Lu says in a phone interview from her headquarters near San Francisco. While she considers her designs beautifully crafted objects in leather, she says that ultimately shoe construction is a commercial art and not a fine art. “You have to wear them and have them be comfortable — it’s ergonomics. I tend to look at shoe engineering from a fit perspective,” she says.
Lu, who started her business six years ago, will be in Denver on Friday and Saturday to show her spring line at Nordstrom. She says her customers tend to fall into two categories. The first is affluent women in their 40s and up who work, travel and value style but don’t want the pain of wearing high heels. The second group is often the daughters of those women. “She is likely to be in her early 30s and likes to dress a little vintage, is very stylish and chic, and a little quirky. She’s not usually following the trends,” Lu says.
Interestingly, after a number of years of vertiginous shoe designs, the spring collections of such designers as Michael Kors and Chloe, along with Lu, included a number of flats and wearable heels.
“There is an outcry,” Lu says. For the past decade, designers were focused on shoes with “towering heels and ignoring how real women feel. Now there’s a backlash, and I think that society as a whole has a focus on women’s well- being,” she says.
Not to mention, “When you abuse your feet for years, by the time you reach your 40s, there are a lot of problems that arise.”
To get the right combination of fit and style in her footwear, Lu has her manufacturing done where many other designers go: Italy. She works with a factory in Tuscany, where the shoes are crafted on a last that mimics what dancers wear. “The Sacchetto construction is Old World — it’s like a ballet flat a dancer wears, a second skin on your foot,” she says. “We sew the upper and lining together like a mitten, with a heel we put on later. They’re very intensely handcrafted, quite labor-intensive.”
That helps explain the price tag, as her designs for spring range from $345 to $425 per pair.
Lu acknowledges that it wasn’t easy for her to break into an industry like shoe design a few years back, but she likes to recall her newbie status as an advantage rather than a drawback. “I didn’t have a lot of jaded opinions. I could look at the industry as an outsider but with a fresh eye.”
Not to mention that she actually wears the designs.
“A lot of women’s shoe designers are men. Because I wear them every day, I can look at what is a true women’s lifestyle,” she says.
Suzanne S. Brown: 303-954-1697 or sbrown@denverpost.com
