Italy Meets Miami in a New Luxury Collaboration
Laure Heriard Dubreuil says she’s been barefoot for the past two weeks. She was on vacation in Mustique; now she’s back in New York, at the Soho outpost of the Webster, the luxury boutique she cofounded in Miami in 2009 (other branches are in Houston; Costa Mesa, California; and Bal Harbour, Florida). We’re on the store’s top floor, a penthouse–turned–personal-shopping haven, complete with 1980s-style low couches and a glass table, that she jokingly refers to as the Scarface room.
GIEVES ANDERSON
Dubreuil’s approach to retail is not to think of it as such. “It’s more about lifestyle for me,” she says. The New York store, which opened its doors in 2017, feels like a thriving scene compared to the empty storefronts that now dominate once-crowded shopping blocks. Part of the appeal is the atmosphere: Playful art pieces are sprinkled throughout the space; there’s a hair salon on the fifth floor, and a welcoming plant-strewn aerie with a plush couch for lounging in the back. This month, there’s the added draw of the Webster’s new accessories capsule collection with Salvatore Ferragamo, which marks the first time the store will carry the brand. Dubreuil, shifting out of vacation mode, slips into a pair of ’40s-style wedges crafted for the collaboration.
Paul Andrew, Ferragamo’s creative director, was inspired to create the wedges after seeing an archival photo of Loretta Young wearing a similar pair in 1938. That photo, and that era, informed several aspects of his spring collection: the “languid, oversize silhouettes,” and the palm prints he found in the archive and reimagined. Andrew says he also explored some of the house founder’s ’40s hits that were born out of necessity. Due to wartime rationing, leather and metal were hard to come by, so Ferragamo began “using materials that he was finding locally, like raffia, lace, and straw,” plus cork for wedges and remnants of leather that could be woven to create bags and shoes.
GIEVES ANDERSON
A similarly inventive spirit comes across in the seven-piece capsule. There’s an open-weave leather version of the Ferragamo Studio, the first handbag style Andrew created when he joined the house. A pair of red wedges with a curvy stacked heel channels Joan Crawford. For Dubreuil, who divides her time between New York, Miami, and Paris, it was important that the pieces come in her (and her customers’) preferred range of standout colors and work as well on Soho cobblestones as they would on Patmos, where she and Andrew once vacationed together. (They’ve been close since meeting in Paris a decade ago.) “These could be supergood with a miniskirt, for Miami!” she exults, referring to a pair of woven mules.
GIEVES ANDERSON
Both she and Andrew hope that the collection’s pieces will register as instantly familiar. “It feels like you’ve always owned them,” she says. Adds Andrew, “It’s not a fantasy, necessarily. It’s beautiful, elevated—but it can immediately work within your daily life.” For Dubreuil, the whole project is “really about feeling good.” She holds up a pair of heels. “And these make me feel very good.”