Paolo Scafora: Neapolitan shoemaking comes to Hogtown
Paolo Scafora demonstrating outsole stitching. (Image courtesy Via Cavour).
It’s rare to see top quality European artisans set up shop in Toronto. Check out Permanent Style’s trunk show calendar and for every week of the year you’ll find one, two or three international tailors, shoemakers or shirtmakers in New York City. Toronto is lucky to get one a month. We’re a smaller market, I get it. We’re off the radar for a lot of makers and companies. And, chances are, many of our retailers are unwilling to risk bringing someone in from Europe.
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Napoli’s Paolo Scafora was in Toronto recently for his second trunk show at Via Cavour, a Yorkville store specialising in Italian menswear. Paolo was in town to personally introduce his latest ready-to-wear collection, take made-to-order, made-to-measure and bespoke orders and, most importantly he told me, share with Torontonians “the culture of handmade things.” I wanted to know, first and foremost, his impressions of Hogtown.
“I love what I’ve seen of Toronto,” he told me, although admitting he’s been so busy he hasn’t had much time to really check out the city. His two trunk shows have been busy, he says, with a number of orders placed. But what really pleases him is meeting customers in person, seeing their excitement and being able to “translate” the culture of handmade, so they can truly understand what goes in to making his shoes.
I wanted to know what went in to making Paolo a shoemaker.
There’s a saying I’ve heard in Italy that the first generation builds it, the second generation consolidates it, and the third generation destroys it. That’s roughly true for Paolo as well. His grandfather was a factory shoemaker. After World War Two, Paolo’s grandfather and his eight sons started their own company “Scafora,” which produced hand-welted shoes. But in the late 1960s and early 70s, as Italy’s economy expanded, Scafora moved to a Blake machine production model, which allowed them to produce up to 800 pairs a day for the growing US and Japanese markets. Paolo joined the company when he was 16 and by the late 2000s, with some of his uncles passing away and changes in the economy, it was time for a shift. If they continued with the Blake factory model, they would be one of many similar shoe makers across Italy, Spain and Portugal. If, however, they returned to their roots and reintroduced hand work to their shoes, they would enter the smaller, more rarefied artisinal market. They would have a story to tell and tap into a culture of handmade products, says Paolo. And so he “blew up” the company business and started “Paolo Scafora.”
At first, Paolo was involved in every part of the shoemaking, from shaping the lasts to cutting the leather to stitching the upper to welting the soles. Now, he has almost thirty people working with him. He tells me people are always surprised when they visit his laboratoria at how young his shoemakers are. Part of that is necessity – there simply aren’t many middle-aged shoemakers out there – and part by design: in turning his studio into a school, he can insure his shoemakers make his shoes his way. “They are an empty piece of paper you can write on,” Paolo says. Nowadays, Paolo is too busy running the company and designing new RTW collections to be involved in every pair. He still works on lasts for bespoke clients and his collections, however, as well as developing shoe patterns.
And it was this last aspect, the style of his shoes, that I wanted to know more about: are they particularly “Neapolitan” or more generally “Italian” in approach? In his opinion, Paolo feels there isn’t as much a uniqueness to Neapolitan shoes as there is to, say, tailoring. Suits and jackets from Napoli are known for being lightweight and unstructured since they are supposed to feel “like a breeze from Mount Vesuvius.” But Paolo’s shoes are anything but light and unstructured. They are surprisingly robust, some with thick soles and aggressively shaped lasts. But Napoli manages to find its way into the shoes, says Paolo, because “there is a culture of hand made items, it is in our DNA, which includes also shoes.”
Paolo Scafora’s ready-to-wear line is available at Via Cavour at 87 Avenue Road. Follow them to find out about his next trunk show in Toronto.
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