<\/p>\n
In a cobbler’s workshop in Los Angeles, the footprints of Hollywood history are stacked floor to ceiling, watched over by a man who says his profession is dying.<\/p>\n
Yellowing boxes hold the lasts — foot-shaped molds — used to create footwear for everyone who was anyone in America’s entertainment capital for more than half a century.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Taylor lies toe-to-toe with Peter Fonda, Tom Jones and Harrison Ford.<\/p>\n
In another stack sit the lasts for Sharon Stone, Liza Minnelli and Goldie Hawn.<\/p>\n
Action heroes Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzeneggar are also present.<\/p>\n
“There’s a bit of everybody here,” says shoemaker Chris Francis, the custodian of the famous feet molds.<\/p>\n
Francis came into the collection a few years after the 2008 death of Pasquale Di Fabrizio, an Italian cobbler known in Los Angeles as the “shoemaker to the stars.”<\/p>\n
“Di Fabrizio made for everyone, from the casino owners to the actors, the performers in Vegas, Broadway, Hollywood, for film — just anybody you could think of who was performing from the 1960s until 2008.”<\/p>\n
Some of the aging boxes contain autographs or dedications from the A-listers.<\/p>\n
Others, like those of Sarah Jessica Parker or “Sound of Music” songstress Julie Andrews, hold drawings from television or film productions.<\/p>\n
– ‘Something that nobody else had’ –<\/p>\n
Hollywood was once the ideal place for a shoemaker, says Francis, with its voracious creative industry that churned out a constant stream of people who needed to make themselves stand out from the crowd.<\/p>\n
“Celebrities would brag about how much they paid for a pair of shoes, and they would want something that nobody else had,” he said, pulling down a box containing the lasts of Adam West, the actor who played Batman in the original 1960s TV series.<\/p>\n
Francis began his own couture journey making clothes, and was given his first gig after being discovered stitching a leather jacket on a park bench.<\/p>\n
“Here in LA, it is easy to be in the right time in the right place,” he laughed.<\/p>\n
But it was footwear that he really wanted to create, and began practicing in his kitchen at home.<\/p>\n
“They were sort of crude at first; I was just teaching myself how to do it,” he said.<\/p>\n
In search of someone to teach him the art, Francis traipsed around Los Angeles looking for an internship.<\/p>\n
“These guys are all old Armenian, Russian guys. They’re all from like the old world — guys from like Iran, Syria.<\/p>\n
“They wouldn’t talk, or they didn’t speak very good English. So you just have to watch and learn, and then just learn by making over and over and over again.”<\/p>\n
And if you don’t pay attention, it can all go wrong, he said.<\/p>\n
“There’s no forgiveness in a shoe. If you miss a step, if you cut a corner, then the next 20 steps after that might suffer. So everything has to be on point the whole time.”<\/p>\n
– Mass production –<\/p>\n
But in a changing world, such meticulous craftsmanship is not always rewarded.<\/p>\n
Where Burt Reynolds or Robert De Niro might once have been happy to shell out thousands of dollars for a pair of handmade shoes, the whole industry has been turned on its head.<\/p>\n
“I’m finding more and more celebrities wanting shoes for free, which is just killing shoemakers like me,” said Francis.<\/p>\n
With his aging rockstar looks, Francis says in darker moments he wishes he had taken the advice of some of the old cobblers who taught him the trade.<\/p>\n
“They told me to go join a band,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When I first started, (one man) said: ‘Why in the world do you want to be a shoemaker? They can buy shoes for $20 these days.'”<\/p>\n
Francis, 48, says some of the old-time shoemakers have given up trying to create footwear from scratch, and now just fix the mass-produced shoes that have put them out of business.<\/p>\n
“As a profession, it’s extremely difficult to survive,” he says.<\/p>\n
pr\/hg\/sst<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a cobbler’s workshop in Los Angeles, the footprints of Hollywood history are stacked floor to ceiling, watched over by a man who says his profession is dying. Yellowing boxes hold the lasts — foot-shaped molds — used to create footwear for everyone who was anyone in America’s entertainment capital for more than half a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2115802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[401097,401099,318979,22860,370533,362681,357975,22693,401096,401098],"class_list":["post-2115801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-chris-francis","tag-cobbler","tag-goldie-hawn","tag-hollywood","tag-hollywood-history","tag-julie-andrews","tag-liza-minnelli","tag-los-angeles","tag-pasquale-di-fabrizio","tag-shoemaker-chris-francis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/LA-shoemaker-holds-Hollywoods-past-in-a-dying-art.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2115801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2115803,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115801\/revisions\/2115803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2115802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2115801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2115801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2115801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}