The appreciation of a shoe’s details can often be felt in the bespoke shoe world where many small details are added to the shoe to set it apart from an ‘ordinary’ ready-to-wear pair. One of these details is called a ‘fiddleback waist’ or ‘violina,’ in Italian. This particular detail happens to be my favorite as well as my least favorite.
As a customer, I love the symmetry of it and how it plays to the shoe’s shape and curves by accentuating its features. As a shoemaker, it is one of the hardest details to add to the shoe. It is time-consuming, has to be precise in its shape, and needs to match perfectly on each shoe so that one does not differ from the other. This is not easy to do, but when done well it is very much worth the effect that the detail provides for both the customer and the maker.
It is a sign of pride in your craftsmanship and elegance in your shoe.
Above you will see the building of the fiddleback waist. During my apprenticeship at Stefano Bemer in 2009 (where I made the shoes you see in this post), we used a spongy cork filler that allowed you to draw your fiddleback design, so as not to mess up. Here I prepared mine, finding the joints of each side of the shoe and putting my ending points there. Then drawing the middle line as best as I could with the symmetry of the last shape.
After putting the sole on, you then have a lot of hammering and smoothing out with the hammer head to really get that sharp shape of the fiddleback waist.
When creating shoes for yourself and the turmoil you can go through, you really begin to appreciate the shoe’s details more than the average person as you know what it took to create them. That is not to take away from non-shoemakers as enthusiasts can often appreciate shoes more than shoemakers themselves, but your appreciation for the effort is greater. Most people sadly don’t understand why one shoe costs more than another and it is the details that really separate most shoes from each other in the upper caliber realm of footwear.
More so now than ever you are starting to get many of these shoe details in ready-made shoes. So it can be understandable how it confuses some of the differentiation between the prices, but trust me, when you actually see a shoe made 100% by hand, your appreciation for the shoe’s details will be at its peak!
—Justin FitzPatrick, The Shoe Snob
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I have read that one of the ways to figure if a shoe is bespoke or MTM is to gently rock it side to side if it balances. Does the beveled waist play a part in this theory?
Hey, I like your blog. What a nice shoes. I like to wear shoes. It's designs are really so nice…Promotional Codes
These are very stylist shoes.These shoes are some of the most reliable and robust shoes available on the market today.
Benjy – Never heard this theory or know whether the outcome produces any real results but a beveled waist should never interfere with a shoe's balance
Though it is on the sole and unseen to those who look down at the shoe . . . to the person wearing them it is the small details like that that make a pair of shoes exquisite.