Daisy-loving shoe designer Fabrizio Viti has collaborated with the equally fragrant Italian ready-to-wear and lifestyle brand La DoubleJ on a footwear capsule for spring ’20.
Viti and La DoubleJ founder J.J. Martin’s share a love of Italy and American pop culture, and both have a cheerful nostalgia for the 60s and 70s. The collection features four of La DoubleJ’s new season prints — created in-house or sourced from Italian archives.
Designs include exploding poppy prints, geometric lucky charms and pom pom shapes. Naturally, the daisy makes an appearance, too, in the form of a vintage ‘60s pattern of microdot pink flowers.
As for the shoe silhouettes, all are existing shapes from Viti’s repertoire. There are clogs and sandals featuring the prints, along with crystal daisy embroidery and gloriously froufrou explosions of ostrich feathers in pale violet and traffic-stopping yellow.
“We’ve all seen a million clogs out there. It’s the most classic shape ever, but we wanted to jazz it up in a DoubleJ way,” Martin told me today at their joint presentation in Paris.
“We always work in degrees of maximalism,” she said, “so while there’s our minimal clog with daisy prints on canvas, you’ve also got the maximal versions with crystal daisies and all the feathers.”
The two met in Milan via mutual friend and gallerist Francesca Kaufmann, and the chemistry was instant. Viti called Martin a couple of weeks later and suggested collaborating.
The result? “An explosion of pizzazz and playfulness,” she laughed.
Martin also has designs on our homes, and there’s currently a pop-up boutique at Le Bristol Paris hotel featuring a selection of pieces from her vibrant fall ’19 ready-to-wear collection alongside her table and homeware goods. The ultimate hostess will also wear the shoes. Obviously. Anything less would just be inexcusably underdressed.
