From scooping gelato to DJing at a local radio station in rural Italy, to designing shoes for the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna, Giuseppe Zanotti’s life has been anything but ordinary. We caught up with the designer on his first visit to Asia post-Covid to talk muses and music
“I was a loser DJ,” Zanotti tells Tatler as we sit down to chat in the Presidential Suite at Fullerton Bay Hotel in Singapore. He’s sat in a lounge chair, wearing his signature black, thickframed glasses. Before becoming one of the world’s most celebrated shoe designers, Zanotti started his career as a DJ for an independent radio station in his hometown in Italy, essentially working for free because he would “spend all [his] money buying records”.'
Zanotti grew up in San Mauro Pascoli, a coastal town one hour south of Bologna known for shoe manufacturing. “It’s a beautiful summer place,” he says. His family owned a quaint restaurant and gelateria on the beach, where he would work during the peak season. “My father and mother had already written my destiny, for me and my siblings—but this destiny felt too strange for me.”
Instead, Zanotti says, he always had a penchant for design—whether that was sketching cars and bikes, or designing out-there ice cream cones for the family business. After he left his career in radio, he began working for a local shoe company. “Since I was a kid, I was amazed by people who work with their hands, the artisans,” he says. “I learnt everything, all the technical components … leather, the inside and outside, lining and upper, accessories and embroideries like jewels, stones, crystals. Shoes are a whole universe.”
He then began designing shoes freelance for brands such as Gianfranco Ferré and Valentino. “At the time, I didn’t have the self-confidence to put my name on my shoes,” he says. “They were just shoes with no name.” In 1994, he finally launched his eponymous brand and showed his first collection in New York.
“Next year [marks] 30 years for my brand,” he muses. “We had nine employees in the beginning; now we have 500.”
Despite Zanotti’s pivot from radio to runway, music has remained a constant in the designer’s life. One of his first designs was a slouch boot, inspired by Janis Joplin—a style that remains a signature in his repertoire today.
“She was the first example of Coachella style: bohemian, free,” he says as he quickly but concisely sketches out the boot on a sketchpad in front of him. “But not free as in empty; free and cultured— like The Velvet Underground or Jimi Hendrix. All these artists and musicians were so important in my upbringing.”
He even has a specific playlist he listens to when he’s in need of a dose of inspiration. Titled Playlist Senza Titolo—or “playlist without a title”—it’s an eclectic collection of songs that Zanotti says brings out “great emotion”. He excitedly connects his phone to the speaker in his hotel room to play us some of his favourites, which include Resonance by Japanese classical composer Akira Kosemura, Cold Little Heart by British folk rock artist Michael Kiwanuka, and All of the Lights by Kanye West and Rihanna, both of whom he has worked with extensively—who can forget RiRi’s custom-made thighhigh Giuseppe Zanotti boots for her 2016 Anti Tour, which took almost three months for the designer and his team to make?
On the surface, it might seem like these songs have little to nothing in common, but the thread that connects them is the quality of production and the emotion behind them. It’s something of a metaphor for Zanotti’s shoes. “When you do something you love, you feel a [sense of ] satisfaction and emotion. You need to follow this emotion,” he says.
