All hail the humble espadrille

By DALE FUCHS
Published in the New York Times on August 16, 2010

MADRID — The humble jute-soled shoe seemed headed for a museum shelf when Isabel Sauras and her husband took over the family espadrille business, Castañer, in the Catalonian town of Banyoles.

It was 1959, and a wave of belated industrialization was sweeping agrarian Spain. Farmers had abandoned their small hilly plots for stable factory jobs in the cities. They no longer needed those cheap, ankle-tie sandals to work the fields in the summer heat.

Many espadrille factories in Catalonia and the French and Spanish Basque regions cut their final braids. But Isabel Sauras and her husband, Lorenzo Castañer, clung to their rope and, with the help of Yves Saint Laurent and other designers, turned the traditional peasant shoe into a fashion statement.

“It was like when the refrigerator did away with the ceramic water jugs,” recalled Ms. Sauras, 77, who still designs the Castañer line. “We saved the espadrille from a museum future and kept it alive in a very contemporary way.”

Today, the Castañer factory, founded in 1927, creates luxury, high-heeled espadrilles for 15 designer labels, including Lanvin, Hermès and Christian Louboutin, and it crafts its own collections for 17 Castañer boutiques in Spain, France and Japan. Their star model, “the peasant,” is a fixture at Spain’s outdoor cafes. It has sold eight million pairs to date.

According to Ms. Sauras, the factory is Spain’s sole survivor of the jute-soled heyday of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, when Salvador Dalí would shuffle about his native Figueres in a white canvas pair bought at the local Castañer store.

Few of the factory’s original clients would be able to toil in, say, the thigh-high, black leather model that Castañer created for a Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show in the late 1980s. And a small-time farmer probably couldn’t afford the €200, or about $255, metallic-leather sandals with platform heels on display recently at a Castañer boutique in Madrid.

But more than 40 specialized seamstresses still hand-stitch the uppers — decorated with everything from zebra prints to Swarovski crystals — to the coiled jute soles. And the factory uses the same jute braiding machines that its founder, Luis Castañer, employed to supply footwear to Republican soldiers during the Spanish Civil War.

“It was cheaper to give each soldier two or three pairs of espadrilles than to give him one pair of shoes,” said Antonio Castañer, the firm’s financial director. The sandals were so strategic that the army nationalized the factory in 1938.

Spain has long been known for making fine shoes, but few shoemakers themselves are recognized abroad. That’s because the industry is composed of small, family-run workshops and factories too tight on cash, or too set in their ways, to worry about building a brand, according to Josep Maria Galí, a professor of marketing at ESADE Business School in Barcelona. Competition from China has put many of those shoemakers out of business.

But Castañer is now one of several family-run Spanish shoemakers who are capitalizing on traditional craftsmanship to carve an international niche. For these artisans, perhaps their greatest problem will be continuing to find skilled workers willing to wield a 15-centimeter, or six-inch, needle.

“I don’t know what we’ll do in 20 years, but we’ll manage,” said Felix Fuster, a fourth-generation espadrille maker who exports his hand-made men’s styles from a workshop in the eastern province of Castellón. He relies on a legion of seamstresses who work from home. “The average age is 70,” he quipped.

Amid the towering jute wedges on display at a Castañer boutique, a modern shopper might have trouble recognizing the original canvas flat, worn mostly by men in only one color combination: white with black ribbons. In 1930, a pair cost two Spanish pesetas, or about a cent, Ms. Sauras said.

That ankle-tie look, born in ancient Mesopotamia, might seem chic in pictures of Ancient Greece, but the espadrille traveled the Mediterranean no thanks to fashion. It owed its popularity to the practical properties of the soles, made of esparto grass, hemp and later jute, according to Luis Castañer, the founder’s grandson, who oversees production at the Castañer factory.

“Jute isolates the feet from cold, humidity and heat,” he said.