“Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world”. This quote is attributed to Marylin Monroe and if only she could come to Amstelveen she would certainly find a few pairs matching this criteria.
To all those, and there are many of you, for whom shoes are a love, weakness or passion, I highly recommend the retrospective exhibition of Jan Jansen, the legendary Dutch shoe designer who began his career in the 1960s and continues to work today.
The exhibition is titled “Inspired by Jan Jansen’s Shoes – 60 Years of Shoes and Dutch Design” and can be seen at Museum Jan in Amstelveen near Amsterdam from 8 June to 29 August 2021, www.museumjan.nl. This small, intimate gallery, located slightly off the popular tourist route, usually presents decorative and functional objects made of glass. This time, however, an exception was made, and rightly so. The Jansen shoe collection is truly beautiful, somewhat provocative and presented in such a way as to become a pretext for showing the development and exploration of Dutch design over the last 6 decades. In other words – it shows how Jansen’s unique, sometimes eccentric shoes have inspired designers of clothing, furniture or decorative fabrics for years. So, you can learn a lot during one visit.
His trade marks are: vivid, bright colours and an inventive approach to materials. The material dictates the shape rather than it is being bent to comply with designer’s vision. A sense of humour, manifesting itself in challenging the gravity with the shape of a heel (floating heel) or giving a red and gold fancy pair the name “Kissing the Pope’s Toe”.
Shoes of his design were auctioned at Christie’s auction house, and catalogues from the event, which took place on 14 February 2007 in Amsterdam, can still be bought on ebay.com for around $120. It is worth noting that a photograph of one of the auctioned pairs of shoes is on the cover of the catalogue, which clearly suggests that they were intended to be a magnet for the public to attend the auctions.
Some of Jansen’s designs were so unusual and original that they were not suitable for mass production, such as the famous “bamboo shoes” (actually made of rattan), but they were always appreciated for their high aesthetics and technological innovation. Others were a huge commercial success, such as the “high heel sneakers” from 1977, which sold one million pairs worldwide and models based on them still appear in many collections today.
Looking back over the decades, it is clear that the artist was ahead of his time when he designed gender neutral shoes in 1981. They were named Bruno and appeared long before unisex clothing and accessories became widely accepted and available.
The exhibition also shows how the designer drew his inspiration from different sources. He was greatly inspired by the nature of the material he worked with, and he is close to the decorative arts of Japan. The “not just another moccasin” model developed by Jansen in 1992 refers directly to origami. The shoe is constructed from a single piece of leather, using folds and overlaps, without seams or stitches. Interestingly, the artist supposedly did not know this technique when designing the shoe.
You can see references in his designs to traditional Dutch clogs, organic shapes borrowed from the world of plants and animals; I also find here the lines of late Gothic boots – close to the foot, with elongated noses and fancifully turned up uppers.
For all lovers of beautiful shoes, the Jan Jansen exhibition is an event not to be missed. His designs have previously been presented in prestigious museums in Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States and Japan. In the Netherlands, he has been hosted by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum het Valkhof and the Kunstsmuseum in The Hague. Now it is time for Amstelveen. The exhibition is intimate, occupying three sizable rooms, and the visiting time – well, it depends on the degree of fascination with the subject. In my opinion, an hour for a visit is a necessary minimum, there is no upper limit, because to these most favourite objects you want to come back several times to dream about wonderfully comfortable, hand-made, one-of-a-kind shoes, which harmonize with your personality, are synchronized with the stage of life you are in and make you feel elegant and confident walking forward to the next, regardless of what the rest of your closet consists of. That is exactly what Jan Jansen shoes are.
