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Given his background, it’s no surprise that Felloni loves spending time in the Italian workshops where Roger Vivier shoes are made. The brand is owned by Tod’s Group, the Italian company based in the Marche region of Italy that has a long tradition of shoemaking. Felloni splits his time between Paris, where the Roger Vivier design studio and atelier are based, and Italy, where he travels to look at prototypes and work closely with the artisans who turn his flights of fancy into reality.

“I draw everything by hand and then I go to the factory to see the shapes and the embroideries and I work in very close contact with the workers,” he says in an interview in Paris on the day of the Roger Vivier spring/summer 2024 presentation.

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What Felloni never did was formally study fashion design. In fact he hadn’t even heard of Roger Vivier until the day of his interview with Miu Miu. “When I was waiting for my first job interview in their office I picked up this Roger Vivier book and I started looking at all these shoes and this one with this special comma-shape in fuchsia,” he says. “I still remember that moment and eventually that was one of the first shoes I found in the Roger Vivier archives and I kept it in my office to look at it every day because it’s the shoe that represents the brand and him best. It was the first shoe I saw in a book that caught my attention.”

The first thing that Felloni did after joining the brand was to collect as many archival pieces as he could get his hands on and display them on a huge table, before hiding them and coming up with his own pieces while still keeping in mind the DNA of the brand. “The memory of those shoes in my head after seeing them makes [my work] contemporary and modern,” he explains. “There’s no point in recreating old models; also because you can’t do certain things any more. Comfort is more important now than back in the 50s – heels then weren’t made for walking. It doesn’t make sense to take the old stuff and copy it but the memory of it helps reinterpret them like I did with the Virgule.”

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He’s referring to that comma-shaped heel (virgule means “comma” in French), which along with the brand’s signature Belle Vivier – the buckled shoe famously worn by Catherine Deneuve in the 1967 film Belle de Jour – has come to represent the brand to the world.

Felloni calls the Virgule a hidden gem that needed to be brought back into the spotlight and had to be reinvented – it is now a bestseller along with the Belle Vivier. “My task is to interpret this brand but also to make it contemporary and bring it into the future,” he says. “I was already inspired by Roger Vivier before joining so it would be absurd not to be inspired by him now but every time you look at one of his creations there is always the search for an idea and for beauty. Even when he experimented, he did it as a trained architect. He thought of shoes as something immortal and that had a power that lasted forever.”

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While Roger Vivier also makes very popular trainers, Felloni says that beauty and elegance will always be at the heart of the brand’s offerings, from heels and bags to dazzling costume jewellery. “I believe that these kinds of shoes will always be around because these days women are free and there are no real trends,” he says. “This is the preciousness of Roger Vivier: a bejewelled shoe or an embroidered shoe can often look old and vintage but he was a master at always making them contemporary. Even in the 60s he used all these embroideries but then juxtaposed them with plastic or other modern materials, and a shoe like the Virgule back then was unheard of, so he was never banal even though he had this pretty aesthetic, which is also who I am.”

For Felloni working at Roger Vivier is a true privilege, he says, not only because of the resources he has at his disposal to make such special creations but also because the brand is the only shoe label with a long history, on a par with that of legacy houses such as Dior and Saint Laurent, both brands for which the house founder made shoes back in the day.

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“I didn’t know anything about his life so it was all a discovery for me,” says Felloni. “He invented many more things in the world of shoemaking than people know about and he also worked for Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. He was very joyous and funny and loved to experiment and wasn’t the stereotypical mean designer. You can tell from his work and the very few video interviews I’ve seen of him. He was very funny and ironic.”

Felloni could easily be talking about himself. His vibrant creations – infused with his larger-than-life personality – are keeping the heritage of Roger Vivier alive and making the brand relevant to cool girls not afraid to show off their femininity and make a statement with their Cinderella shoes.