I Found an Art: Vintage Pen and Ink Shoe Illustration

I’ve always admired old fashion illustrations — from the fancy washes of a Joe Eula watercolour for Halston to the more humble gouache made for catalogues or prototypes. But I have always admired them from afar — either reprinted in books or behind glass in a museum.

These workaday drawings are very ephemeral. Most get tossed out, misfiled or simply lost. In fact, I never thought I’d find any kind of fashion illustration on one of my vintage hunts, yet last week I came across this badly framed illustration of a show. It looks to have been cut out of a larger piece of paper and there is pencil smudges, but it is a precise rendering of what looks like a 1940s era pump with a jewelled shoe clip. It looks quite nice hanging beside my framed Alanna Cavanagh postcard.