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THE TRUE STORY OF THE MARX SISTERS
A shoe is always a story connected to a feeling, a moment in my life, a work, a song, a film, a person. I have to connect all the dots in a drawing in order to make progress and let a figure appear, and that's absolutely essential because that's how I weave my life together.
Each of my designs has its own personality and each pair is loaded with a story that grabs you by your feet and allows you to move forward, to feel firmly grounded, your feet on the ground, your head in the stars.
We ask crazy things of these shoes, like taking everything in the face instead of our feet and taking care of our whole body, keeping it upright, conquering and confident.
Shoes allow us to come into contact with the outside world. Without them, we wouldn't set foot outside. Unless you live in the countryside, you can go barefoot without the risk of skinning the soles of your feet or having your little toe stepped on by an asshole.
Shoes are a connector and should be idolised. At least my shoes, which have become or will become yours, because it's obvious that we were made to understand each other.
Because as well as physically transporting you from point A to point B, they also have to transport you psychically. And that's my job. So that before you wear your shoes, you can hold them in your hands and say to yourself: "Wow, am I really going to wear this insane pair of shoes today? I've made my childhood dreams come true. I don't need anything else than these jewels on my feet".
My mission is to give you the pleasure of having an object in your home that you can admire but also have others admire. Because it will make you stand out and give you the confidence you need to excel with every step you take.
That's where I come in, with my desire to always fill you with wonder, and by giving a story to the model you're wearing.
When I was young, my father was rarely around. And even when he was, he wasn't even there. Or on the weekends, but not all the time. And I wasn't the daughter of divorcees. I was the daughter of a father who was always on the road working. He worked non-stop, without a break. And he used to tell me that a human being is fulfilled through work. So when he came back, after having driven for miles, he wanted to catch up with me and my sister. So he'd turn up with the boot of his car full of VHS tapes that he'd buy as he went along, at the markets. When I was very young, I had unlimited access to film culture. At home it was Netflix before Netflix, and only with master films, not like on this streaming platform that looks more like a dump than a luxury video library.
On Friday evenings, after school, we closed the curtains and shut the shutters, switched on the VCR, made popcorn on the gas cooker and started a video marathon. It was up to whoever fell first. Time had no hold on these sessions and I sometimes had the feeling that we were pulling all-nighters when, in truth, we were only pushing until 1am because we were so tired from our week.
That's how I developed a film culture that even the Cahiers du Cinéma would love to open up my skull to dissect my brain and understand how all this is humanly possible. I started by seeing films that weren't obvious to a six-year-old, but which had the gift of hypnotising me. Like Battleship Potemkin, the first King Kong, An andalusian Dog, the Chaplins, the Buster Keatons, the Kirk Douglas, the John Fords, the Eastwoods, the Mack Sennetts, the W.C. Fields, the Allens, the Altmans, the McCareys and, since this is what we're interested in, the Marx Brothers, who accompanied me many times during my cinema sessions at home. To this day I don't know how many of their films I've actually seen. Although they didn't make many, less than twenty, I think I was always going round and round the same ones. Just for the pleasure of seeing the gags again from every angle, understanding them and assimilating the alternation of their visual humour combined with Groucho's killer lines. It really was a unique combination, never to be repeated. As they were working at the time of the transition from silent to talkies, they made the most of it by adapting their humour to the era of this profound change.
So that's what I was fed as a child, eating VHS with my eyes wide open. Laughing and sometimes terrified at Universal's Nosferatu or first Frankenstein films. But fascination always won out over the rest, and I continued to marvel at such imagination.
That's why today, a few years later, when it comes to naming this delightful low-boot, I'm looking back at what built me up, what gave me pleasure and joy, and hoping to pass on some cheerfulness to you with this model, renamed Marx Sisters. Because that's what we are, and that's what binds us together after all: the desire to feel good and to trust each other deeply, with a clear conscience.