The wedding industry is HUGE! £10BN per year in the UK and a pretty significant sum of this is attributable to shoes! Be it the bride’s, the mother of the bride’s or any manner of significant and insignificant guests. Almost everyone rocks new, near-new or seriously loved shoes for a wedding.
At The Restory, we are all about keeping shoes as fresh and relevant for as long as possible without sacrificing any of the excitement of a brand new pair.
And in that vein, here are a few musings about wedding footwear;
Who can argue with the ethereal whites, creams, and silvers of traditional bridal footwear? But If you have second life ambitions for your wedding shoes, remember that after the dreamy romance of the ceremony its time to party! And friends and family alike will be stepping on and spilling drinks all over your new Emmy London shoes (the designer who recently created, Pippa Middleton’s wedding shoes)! In this vein, we’d recommend suedes over satin as we can employ a much more aggressive cleaning technique on leather over fabric and because they are lightly coloured the risk of colour bleed (like we see with brightly coloured suedes) is low.
Style-wise, metallics are infinitely universal. They go high and they go low. They are a statement and they are a neutral. What’s not to love? Apart from a longevity /maintenance standpoint, metallics can be a tricky colour restore. Not only does one need to match the colour and finish, the type of and quantity of mineral needs to be matched too. To complicate things, some are painted and some are foiled. While we have lots of tricks to minimise scratches and scuffs on toes and we can have new leathers to recover heels, overall the best thing to do is just recognise the limitations and be vigilant.
Stones, flowers and other embellishments are just super fun. They are also usually attached with glue or light stitching which means they can get torn or knocked off easily. If you can save the piece, reattaching it is often a simple quick fix. If you lose it we can usually find you a similar or complimentary one. So, go bold and dress from the feet up!
London is packed with supremely talented bespoke shoe makers, like the aforementioned Emmy London or Kari-C, who can make your shoe fantasy into a shoe reality. But what if you are looking to work with something you already own? The Restory’s custom refashioning service is here to help; ace a bejewelled pump, add studs, rhinestones, raffia fringes or fur pompoms! Why not reinterpret Louboutin’s red sole with a different colour or a custom piece of artwork? Feeling a little rock and roll? We know a leather tattoo artist too. Come talk to us.
