PARIS — With a new home in Paris and a recently opened archive, Roger Vivier is rewriting the book on its history.
The French footwear brand has teamed with Rizzoli on a monograph titled “Roger Vivier: Heritage and Imagination,” to be launched Tuesday during Paris Couture Week in tandem with creative director Gherardo Felloni’s latest Pièce Unique collection of one-of-a-kind handbags and waistcoats.
Curated by Elizabeth Semmelhack, director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, the tome offers a fresh look at the legacy of the founder and the house’s current chapter under Felloni.
The book’s format is inspired by the salons of the 18th century, intellectual gatherings where literary, philosophical or artistic discussions took place.
Over five sections, deep dives into history and technique are spliced with conversations with industry experts and friends of the house such as Catherine Deneuve, Laura Dern, Eva Green and longtime brand ambassador Inès de la Fressange.
“I thought it would be, hopefully, a delightful way to engage with the history, both past and present,” said Semmelhack, an academic who has written two previous books about the brand.
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It marks the first time that Felloni — named Designer of the Year at the 2023 Footwear News Achievement Awards — has been included in a Vivier monograph, an experience he described as equal parts thrilling and nerve-wracking.
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“It’s quite complicated, but I feel honored, and I’m really happy because the book is beautiful,” he said, joking that he was particularly pleased that it includes a flattering portrait of his younger self, now preserved for immortality.
Pushing the Envelope
Like Felloni’s short films for the house, the pages are saturated with color. Close-ups of shoe designs and archival images are spliced with photo albums of celebrities in Vivier.
On one page alone there are images of Rihanna, Billie Eilish, Meryl Streep and Princess Grace of Monaco — testament to the broad appeal of the brand, best known for the Belle Vivier buckle shoe immortalized by Deneuve in the classic film “Belle de Jour.”
Vivier originated many seminal heel shapes that have influenced generations of footwear designers — among them the comma-shaped Virgule, the concave Choc and the Epine, adorned with a thorn.
“What he did so fundamentally changed fashion that we see his refinement, his elegance, his constant interest in new materials, pushing the envelope of what shoes can be,” Semmelhack said.
“His stiletto was arguably the most elegant version created to this day, and yet he was also one of the first to suggest that women try lower heels, and he was constantly innovating the architecture of the shoes that he designed,” she continued.
“What I personally really love about his work is that no matter how embellished his pieces are, the fundamental architecture, the form of his work, was so perfectly balanced that it stands the test of time. You look at a Vivier shoe from 1955 and you could wear it today,” she noted.
“Keeping that joie de vivre, that adventurous spirit, alive is, I think, really central to the success of the maison today,” Semmelhack opined. Revived by Italian entrepreneur Diego Della Valle in 2003, the brand now belongs to Tod’s Group.
Old and New
To mark the launch of the book, she has curated an exhibition at the Salon de l’Héritage, the space at Vivier’s recently inaugurated Paris headquarters, that juxtaposes Felloni’s creations with shoes from the archive.
“It’s the first time that you will see a really new product put next to the old pieces from which I get the inspiration,” said Felloni, who confessed he was nervous about being compared to the man dubbed the Fabergé of footwear. “It’s fun, but in a way, it’s a little bit tricky.”
Felloni’s spring 2026 Pièce Unique line, titled Atelier Animalier, offers a fresh spin on the leopard, zebra and giraffe motifs that Vivier developed in the 1960s — now rendered in unexpected shades like green, blue and pink.
His new designs will be displayed in his office, with the source material on show in the basement archive room.
Semmelhack noted the in-house archive contains many examples of Vivier’s work after 1963, following the end of his 10-year collaboration with Christian Dior, making it a valuable complement to the collections held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Bata Museum.
“People now understand that what people make for us to wear, how we wear it, why we wear it, is deserving of critical inquiry, and so books like this, archives like Vivier’s, help add to that increasingly important conversation,” she said.
Felloni is happy his work now has a physical home in the archive, but he prefers to keep the past at arm’s length.
“My job is not to be a historian of fashion shoes. My job is to be a designer. As a designer, you need to know history, you need to know what’s happened, but then in a way, you have to forget and go on,” he explained.
Still, the spirit of Vivier is always with him. His favorite quote from the founder appears on the last page of the book: “To wear dreams on one’s feet is to begin to give a reality to one’s dreams.”
Felloni says it sums up the way he has parlayed shoe design into a life where he now rubs shoulders with women he grew up admiring from afar, such as Isabella Rossellini or Cher.
“I come from a little countryside village and for me, these women were impossible to reach, in a way. And then, thanks to Vivier, thanks to my creations, thanks to my job, I had the chance to make this dream real. And it was thanks to a pair of shoes, basically,” he said.