Louis Vuitton’s Shoe Designer Has a House Full of Dolls
Fabrizio Viti, the 50-year-old Italian who has designed Louis Vuitton’s women’s shoes for a dozen years, shares his home with approximately 600 women. They are all dolls. “You have your own little model,” he says, toying with an original 1960s Barbie in the room devoted to housing his collection. “And the agency doesn’t call her back!”
Starting in that decade and spanning through to today, Viti’s obsession with dolls overflows into every room of his Art Deco apartment on the Rue de Babylone in Paris’s Left Bank. His bedroom dresser is stuffed with Hermès boxes, each packed with doll paraphernalia. Tug open another, and several celluloid figures are laid in cardboard coffins. A Vuitton hatbox explodes with miniature clothing and shoes — the former are perfect re-creations of runway looks by Prada or Miu Miu, specially commissioned by Viti; the latter are replicas of Viti’s designs, complete with Lilliputian labels. A Marilyn Monroe figurine — part kitschy conversation piece, part plaything — sits on a side table in his parlor. Her head has been snapped off, accidentally.
From “In Paris, the Shoe Designer Who Collects Dolls” by Alexander Fury, 2016; Photo by Thibault Montamat
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