Giuseppe Zanotti about Bowie, Slimane and West

Giuseppe Zanotti is one of the main shoemakers of modern times. He creates collections under the brand name, is responsible for shoes Balmain, Christopher Kane, Proenza Schouler and develops shoes in collaboration with the model Anya Rubik.

Text: Liza Kologreeva

The Italian came to Moscow to open his first single-brand boutique in GUM. Look At Me met with the designer and talked to him about the music - in his youth he was a DJ.

I am a mature man, but when I was seventeen or eighteen, I wanted to make a career as a musician. He quit this job because it didn’t work very well. What I liked about the work of the DJ was that he took several tracks and made a compilation of them. In essence, the shoemaker’s task is the same: I take the materials and create one object from them.

In general, music and fashion have a lot in common: you can write beautiful songs and not so much, you need to be able to play one instrument or another, the same with shoes. In both cases, one cannot be too commercial, on the other hand, one cannot spend five years on an album and a collection. In any disc twelve songs maximum. They should be united by one story, and if you make a mistake with at least one, you will ruin the whole album, as well as with the line of shoes. Then, the musician needs an orchestra, and I need a team: an agent, a manager, a distributor. In music, you can do Gangnam Style, and you are lucky to become a world famous musician. The designer can become famous in a jiffy. But in normal life this does not happen. However, what kind of life is generally considered normal?

My taste in music is very flexible. I love jazz. You do not listen to jazz, you feel it. I love Benny Goodman, for example. Then I can switch to blues, my favorites are Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday. And Janis Joplin is the other side of the blues, stronger. I can listen to Jimi Hendrix. I like the modern language of music. Now the most important thing in music is the text. Here in front - rap, it evolves. It can be very strange, wild and raw, but full of power. It is very close to the world of fashion and its language.

For me, music is a whole universe, it’s hard to find one thing for myself. Today I want to listen to rappers, sometimes even read their lyrics, tomorrow - electronic music, such as Daft Punk, or Swedish House, then - Nicky Minaj, Rihanna. Of course, at the beginning of her career she was very commercial, remember the song Umbrella, but now she is very cool. I love Alisha Kiz - she is the sweetest, sweetest person, beautiful and with a good voice. Of course, I listen to Kanye West, but also John Legend, with whom we are good friends, the same story with Shiloh.

Although the main thing in music for me is the search for associations. For example, an interesting story happened two days ago. It was my birthday, and the Italian singer Malika Yang sent me the album Patrick Watson on iTunes, which she thought I should have listened to. During the flight from Bologna to Moscow, I listened to it and said "Okay ..." Because if you listened to this album, you need to listen to another one - the band The Delano Orchestra, I love them. It seems that Patrick Watson took inspiration from them. Such are the associations.

I love working with musicians. So, I met Kanye West four years ago at an amfAR charity auction. Then I created shoes for Michael Jackson’s show with clothing designers - Christophe DeCarnen from Balmain, Ricardo Tisci, Tom Ford. But, unfortunately, Michael Jackson left this world, and amfAR ambassador Janet Jackson offered to put things we created up for auction. Kanye West was also present with his girlfriend Amber Rose. Then he said that he was fascinated by fashion, I invited him to my studio and to the factories, and he came. We experimented a bit and made friends. He very quickly learned the process of creating shoes and became involved. So he suggested that I make shoes together: for his shows, for my shows. This month he stopped by again, before that he worked on his album in Paris - he is almost ready, and we will again do something together.

I follow the music projects of other houses. The latest Saint Laurent advertising campaign with musicians is the future, Edi Slimane is watching it. This is not an advertisement, this is a story, you can easily imagine how the shooting took place, to create such a film in your head. I think this is the most incredible idea in fashion advertising over the past twenty years. Compared to this campaign, everyone else is just boring.

Of course, music inspires me. My spring-summer collection is like a trip from Los Angeles to Vegas in the 1980s. At that time, all the creams of modern music lived in the United States, African American music flourished. The story was ethnic, maybe not even ethnic, but more abrupt, about Verushka’s style. While working on shoes, I listened to music like blues and soul, Dennis Kofi, Tavares, and R'n'B modern. This triangle inspired me to create the autumn-winter collection: David Bowie and his glam rock, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain and the very harmonious punk band The Cure. Three of these formations had an incredible style, and they believed in fashion and believed in fashion. Like Mick Jagger at the beginning of his career. The Beatles were great musicians, but when it came to style, they were boring. But John Lennon became more interesting when he was with Yoko Ono. The guys from the Sex Pistols also believed in fashion, they were crazy. Sting at the very beginning also believed in fashion. There is pure fashion in music, their connection creates true art.