Today, October twelfth, 2025, Cesare Paciotti has died. To compare him to other shoemakers is impossible. His immeasurable inventive elegance, his absolute lack of predictable patterns, always, and increasingly, brought astonishment. In an unending scale, up until today. They speak of a sudden illness and death. Perhaps he had imagined it precisely like this, but this does not absolve us from pain and immense sorrow. I am a lover of shoes and consider the art of fashion accessories to be fundamental, an art in which we Italians have historically been and still are the prime numbers, in the sense of being indivisible and unattainable. Paciotti didn't just make footwear; he primarily created sensations, emotions, in a context of luxury, interpreting shoes as the ontology of elegance, a fundamental aspect of every formalities or of each causation, therefore, from the luxuriance that begins with the choice of raw materials, of the design, which is endogeny, made of comfort that adapts to the foot and creates a fluid and significant gait, and from the morphology, which must attract the eye to the thing itself, capture it until it is intoxicating and makes it upside down; what is below and touches the ground becomes metaphysical and commands all attention. In other words, the elegance of the foot frees the mind from the drama of hairstyling, in the absolute sense, and punctuates the increasingly refined makeup of the face, with creams, powders, and anti-ageing treatments, which are defeating the image of old age, not understood as the passage of years, because we do not yet know the magic formula, but as whiteness and pallor, hideous wrinkles, skin blemishes.
Paciotti has been (and his line remains) the Armani, the Versace, of high fashion footwear and ankle boots (of which the author owns two wonderful examples), and I would also add Prada and Dolce&Gabbana, who continue the stellar progress of the Italian fashion system. Someone like him, surely seated on the same throne in the afterlife, where Caterina and Maria de’ Medici have been for centuries, and more recently, Jole Veneziani, the Fontana Sisters, Olga di Crésy, Emilio Pucci, Salvatore Ferragamo, Dino Lora Totino, Giuliana Coen Camerino, Angelo Litrico, Emilio Schubert, Nazareno Fonticoli and Gaetano Savini (Brioni), the founders of Ermenegildo Zegna (and I take this opportunity to greet Paolo, Ermenegildo Junior and Elena Zegna, who I hold dear). And forgive me to those I haven't mentioned, belonging to an Italian galaxy that has no equal in the world. And praise for G.B. Giorgini cannot be omitted. Paciotti marks the highest testament to the boldest line of research in footwear, a stylistic expansion that falls within the style vinciano which acts as our covering and garment, having become planetary, as Alexandrinism did to Hellenism. A style that holds its own in its complexity and organic nature, while other competitors fall apart, like the English and French, who only produce fragments and not a complete style like ours; the rest is kitsch, trash, folk.
Hail Caesar!
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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