The Man Who Invented the Heel
Roger Vivier opened his own Paris maison in 1937 and spent the following decades doing something almost no shoe designer manages twice: inventing forms that other designers are still working from. He patented the buckle-throated pump early in his career, then in 1953 designed Queen Elizabeth II's gold-kidskin coronation shoes — as concrete a royal commission as footwear gets.
A year later, in 1954, working with Christian Dior in a collaboration unusual enough that Vivier's own name appeared jointly on the shoes, he created the stiletto heel itself: steel-cored, engineered rather than merely shaped, and immediately imitated by everyone else in the industry. The Comma heel, the Choc, the Virgule followed — heels sculpted with enough individual character that the house has compared his approach to Brancusi shaping birds.
The house's second immortal object arrived in 1965: the Belle Vivier buckle pump, designed for Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian collection. Its fame was sealed on screen when Catherine Deneuve wore it in Belle de Jour, and the square buckle from that shoe remains the house's monogram in metal to this day.
Tod's Group revived the maison in the 2000s, returning its archive of crystal buckles, embellished slingbacks and sculpted heels to the 20 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré boutique. It is a rare thing for a design house: an unbroken line from a queen's coronation to a movie star's closet to a sneaker, all traceable to the same one man's decade of invention.
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- Roger Vivier 20 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris
Roger Vivier opened his own maison in Paris in 1937 and went on to patent the buckle-throated pump in 1942, design the coronation shoes for Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and create the first stiletto heel in 1954; the house's boutique stands at 20 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. store page → · open in the atlas →