Kari Sigerson and Miranda Morrison create fantasy shoes. Not those kind of fantasy shoes, but the kind women dream about. Stylish shoes that do wonders for a woman’s legs and–here’s the kicker–make comfort a serious priority.
How stylish? Their clean lines and distinctive details won them the 1996 CFDA Perry Ellis award for accessories. Their strappy thongs, square-toed loafers and U-shaped mules have gained a following among models like Helena Christensen and Naomi Campbell and actresses Rosanna Arquette and Liv Tyler. A steady stream of designers and other fans who want to see the full collection find their way to their tiny store at 242 Mott St. on the edge of New York’s Little Italy.
Under the label Sigerson Morrison, these two 35-year-old designers are determined to meld style and comfort without asking women to break the bank. Stretch it a bit, perhaps, for their Italian-made shoes tend to cost around $200, with sandals priced lower and boots climbing over the $400 mark.
“They offer very good value,” says Lynne Henry, who buys the line for Chicago’s Ultimo boutique. For comparable style and quality, women often have to spend twice as much. The shoes also are carried at Neiman Marcus on Michigan Avenue, Krivoy in Lincoln Park and Pampered Soles in Winnetka.
“A lot of shoes, it seems to me, are designed for people about as real as Jessica Rabbit,” says Morrison, a native of England who studied sculpture and printmaking at Oxford before becoming a shoe designer. “We don’t like to do a heel you can’t walk on, no matter how sexy it might be. There is a certain sort of brain that says `that’s sexy,’ the vulnerability of a woman who can’t walk across the room.”
“For us, that’s the stupidity,” adds Sigerson, an Omaha native who studied art history at the University of Nebraska. “We would rather you move around and be yourself. That’s sexy.”
The designing duo met when they both enrolled in a shoemaking course at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1987. As the only students in the two-year class who already had college degrees, the two bonded immediately.
After graduating, they struck out on their own, first making custom shoes and then segueing into a wholesale collection in 1991. They knew instinctively that being women would give them an advantage in a field dominated by men.
“So often you’ll find a beautiful, beautiful shoe that a man designs, but when you put it on, it’s not comfortable,” says Cynthia Hadesman, a clothing and hat designer who owns half a dozen pairs of Sigerson Morrison shoes and buys them for her store, Krivoy. “Gucci’s great, but their shoes have a bondage feeling. After two hours you want to take them off.”
Sigerson and Morrison edit their collection by asking each other and their friends whether they would wear such a shoe. “You have to imagine having them in your life,” says Sigerson. “And men just can’t do it.”
A FASCINATION WITH FOOTWEAR
They grew up an ocean apart, but Kari Sigerson and Miranda Morrison both had a tough time finding shoes. And both can trace their fascination with footwear back to their early years.
Morrison grew up in England pigeon-toed, with very narrow feet and a high instep. Shoe shopping was an ordeal. Her choices always had to be sent back to the factory for adjustments. “I had delayed gratification for shoes. It would take several weeks for the shoes to arrive,” she recalls. “That got me wondering how you make them.” When she wasn’t reading up on shoemaking, she was redesigning shoes in her head. “I was always thinking there could be something better about them.”
Sigerson remembers visiting store after store in Omaha with her mother, who had extremely narrow, hard-to-fit feet. Her own problems were on the aesthetic end. “You can get a bazillion sneakers (in Omaha), but you can’t get a decent, stylish shoe that you can wear around the world and not be embarrassed by,” she says. Any time she traveled, she set out in search of shoes. “If I went to Denver, I’d go directly to the shoe shore and gobble up shoes with every last penny I had.”
