Sutor Mantellassi was established in 1912 when the brothers Ettore and Enea Mantellassi, master cobblers as a vocation, opened their first artisan workshop to manufacture men’s footwear in a small Florentine district. The values characterizing the brand nowadays, worldwide bywords for elegance, reliability and unique style, have remained unchanged from the start: it is the tradition of “hand-made” shoes, which is preserved and carried over in time with pride and passion...
The workshop that once manufactured just a few precious pairs of shoes has now become a leading company in the luxury sector, guided by an entrepreneurial team looking at the future with a precise strategic vision, which is based upon that competitiveness, organization and experience necessary to develop and strengthen the brand identity, the product range and a global expansion. Today, Sutor Mantellassi belongs to Sutor S.p.A., an industrial holding company and a new luxury pole tracing its origins back to respect of tradition and to the know-how that have made the Italian Style famous all around the world: rare assets, which need to be preserved, in order to continue guaranteeing the highest result and top quality performance.
The brand counts on a capillary distribution through specialty stores and selected POS in Europe, USA, Russia, and Japan, plus some mono-brand boutiques in Florence, Cortina and Milan, where the showroom was opened in Via Bigli, the heart of the Milan fashion area, in 2007. Notwithstanding their exponential development, Sutor Mantellassi still manufactures just a few thousand pairs of shoes per year: the real challenge is to continue producing with the same manual skills the artisans of the maison have been handing down in almost a century’s time.
Nonostante lo sviluppo esponenziale, dalle fucine di Sutor Mantellassi, come in passato, escono poche migliaia di scarpe l’anno: la vera sfida è continuare a creare con la stessa sapienza manuale che gli artigiani della maison si tramandano da quasi cent’anni.
THE INSPIRATION
The name Sutor comes from Latin meaning “fine sewer, cobbler”, to indicate the feature the brand has kept alive throughout the years, attracting people like Ezra Pound, Loius Aragon, the Duke of Manchester, Giovanni Spadolini, Oriana Fallaci, Marcello Mastroianni and many other internationally-known figures, all eager to wear accessories that, today like in the past, are both functional and represent real icons of an aesthetical code inspired by the gentlemen’s everlasting savoir-faire. It is not by chance that Marcello Mastroianni was wearing a model by Sutor Mantellassi when he sets his footprints in cement on Hollywood Boulevard in front of a crowd of photographers and admirers back in 1965.
More than a shoe, it’s a state of mind. The handicraft performance is blended with an artistic and emotional dimension of beauty: Sutor Mantellassi translates the class and emotions you feel when wearing timeless accessories, which become even more beautiful with the passing of time, getting closer to the body of those who wear them, following their steps and movements and to be continuously rediscovered like real objects of desire.
THE PRODUCT
Respect of tradition, excellent manufacture, exclusive design and high-quality materials. The Sutor Mantellassi product is dedicated to an heterogeneous range of cultivated and demanding customers making a precise aesthetic choice; each accessory, from shoes to handbags, and again to small leather goods, is manufactured following the precepts of a refined and impeccable, but also casual and relaxed dressing style, just like modern men, divided between the city and recreation, between work and moments of relax.
Unique objects, handmade by expert craftsmen with an immense patience, love and precision: apart from modern techniques and the most advanced machinery, these ingredients adapt to a market with a more and more updated offer, tuned to a constantly evolving fashion system. A product deriving from almost a century of experience, dedicated to the careful choice of hides, the extreme perfection of details and manufacturing techniques of an antique tradition, and yet so extraordinarily contemporary.
For those who love to choose with attention, for those who are able to understand perfection in imperfection. And imperfection in perfection. Three generations of master shoemakers have jealously guarded the secrets of a craft that becomes knowledge, art, and harmony. From classic to the most up-to-date models, passing through “customized" manufacturing, Sutor Mantellassi is the symbol of footwear modelled and built on the anatomic shape of the foot and upon the desires of the single customer. The attitude to luxury and comfort is marked by essential lines, however always careful to trends, soft and prestigious hides, details and elements that not only accurately respond to decorative requirements, but most of all to functional needs.
And the pride of the brand is exactly the pursuit of perfection; the recurring combination of elegance and comfort, tradition and modernity; the ability to express their style and own personality in a unique and absolute way.
Together with winter and summer footwear collections, Sutor Mantellassi also offers the EXECUTIVE and TRAVEL accessory lines, contributing to characterising the style of the most sophisticated and demanding clientele, describing their personality, taste and attitude to life. Two collections of exclusive accessories, elegant and excellent in their constructions, are dedicated to formal occasions as well as to moments of leisure and relax.
The Travel collection is manufactured using higher quality materials, like leather tanned in wooden drums and then dyed in barrels and not spray painted (a traditional method which is not used anymore), or with vegetable leather masterly combined with canvas. For the Executive line, hides are hand brushed and processed with the Oasis working, a historical and distinctive feature of the Sutor Mantellassi brand. Further in the collection, a series is dedicated to more noble and refined materials like crocodile, python skin and ostrich, in matt or shiny versions according to the client's desires. The linings are rigorously in Alcantara, the Metal Fittings customized and exclusively hand-made, the big zip fasteners respond as well to a craft construction.
THE WORKINGS
Montaggio Blake (Blake Assembly): the commitment to care for details and the time used to shape the shoe on the last distinguish a Sutor Mantellassi product, even after a standard working.
Costruzione Bologna (Bologna Construction): this is the most complex and comfortable wear. The processing is studied to obtain a perfect leather adherence. Starting from a bag construction, the shoe is then placed on a last and sewn to the inner leather sole reinforced with a jute fabric, pulling each stitch tight by hand.
Tubolare (Tubular Construction):
Comfort and extraordinary flexibility are the main features of this workmanship. The shoe is placed on a last, stretched and tacked by hand. Then the “vaschetta” is sewn to the vamp with more than 100 stitches, made one by one.
Costruzione Goodyear (Goodyear Construction):
this comes from a Sutor tradition and requires extreme manual rigor to follow the shape of the shoe. The final result is a highly refined sports shoe.
Costruzione Norvegese (Norwegian Construction):
using thread and awl (which have always been the symbol of the Sutor brand) the sole, the underfoot, the lining and the vamp are sewn together. The same patient work is carried out for the second and inner sole: more than 600 stitches for an excellent artefact.
Crocodile Models:
These Sutor Mantellassi shoes are absolutely exclusive and luxury: they are made with only leather coming from the animals belonging to the family of “alligator mississipiensis”, and this is why it is jealously kept and guarded in a real vault inside the factory. The sizes are conformable to the number and to the model of the shoe we want to create, in order to have a homogeneous vamp on the entire leather, with regular big scales of the best dimension.
The manufacturing of each pair of shoes requires the most valuable part of two entire hides. These selected hides are tanned through a special procedure, making them more resistant to wear and tear, especially in the areas between the scales, which are considered to be the most delicate part of a crocodile. After production, the shoes remain in the last for at least 20 days, for them to dry naturally: this makes the hide adapt to the form and acquire higher elasticity, memory form and resistance properties.
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