| have been done by others. With his hands and various curved pushing and pulling instruments, he molds the still-soft block of paper, glue and burlap into its finished pointe – square, long, flat, oval and curved in all the right places. The shoes are then set to dry overnight in large ovens to preserve the shapes perfectly – until the dancer reshapes them before wearing. It is by their “shapes” that we know our makers, and it is their shapes that will win for them their “own dancers.” |
| Entering the factor, I was struck by two things: the shoes, which are everywhere – 40 pairs at a time stacked in four-foot-high cones of shiny silk – and the lasts. These are the heavy plastic molds around which each shoe is shaped. They are blue, green, brown, and yellow, and there are 8,000 of them at Freed’s. They resemble the idealized smooth, slim, elongatedshape
of a dancer’s foot, and they give the Freed’s shoe its distinctive shape. The natural foot lives and works inside a toeshoe that is molded to an ideal perfection: the bumps, lumps and angularities that a dancer’s foot develops are the compensatory results. Were our feet as smooth and symmetrical as our lasts, we could emerge unscarred from our shoes. A last is a compromise, fashioned to have the hypothetical curve that lies somewhere between a dancer’s flat |
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| foot and arched foot – two very different sizes and shapes, yet the same shoe must serve both. |
| The women who inhabit the large room next to the makers perform the last stage in the birth of a toe shoe. It is one of the wonders of their skills that in just 30 seconds the “drawstring lady” can stitch the string and its casing to the edge of the satin shoe. At the heel end of the outside shank, Freed’s famous trademark – two standing toe shoes – is pressed into the leather; the toe end gets a crisscross design to help prevent slipping. The name of the dancer is then written by hand on the shank. Kohler explained that because different-color pens are sometimes used to inscribe each shoe in a pair, dancers often complain
that they did not receive a true pair. As all toe shoes are the “same” – there is no left or right – the dancer decides which shoe does on which foot. The date of the shoe’s birth is stamped on the shank to help in sorting out returned shoes and tracing complaints. Shoes are cleaned, bagged and sorted for shipping. The women’s workroom is more bright and convivial than the makers’. Here there are no pinup girls, but family snapshots and calendars of Princess Diana, Prince Charles and the Royal Baby. |
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