THE FOUNDATIONS
A house known by its refusals.
Against the Quiet
TARO ISHIDA exists because the industry it belongs to lost its nerve. Over the past decade, luxury taught itself to recede, into muted colour, into softened line, into the safety of going unremarked, and it came to call this caution refinement.
The house was built on the opposite conviction: that an object of real worth asks to be looked at, and that the woman who chooses it has no intention of disappearing into the room.
Form First.
Every piece begins as a form. Before a stone is chosen or a surface considered, its architecture is settled: the proportion of the heel, the carriage of the line, the balance of the whole.
The ornament comes afterward, and it is never laid over the design as decoration. It is drawn out of the design itself, taking its measure from the same curves and proportions, until in the finished piece one can no longer say where the structure ends and the embellishment begins. The stones are natural, faceted by hand before they are set by hand.
Made in Italy.
Everything is made in Italy, by hand, in the few ateliers that still work to the standard of a jeweller rather than a factory.
A single pair can take more than thirty hours to complete. Each design is made in a fixed and limited number, then retired and never made again.
This is not scarcity arranged for effect. It is the natural consequence of work carried out this slowly, by so few, to so exacting a standard.
For the woman who decided how she'd be seen, long before the shoes.