Posted 6 years ago
Jacque1953
(1 item)
Any info would be appreciated! My mom had these and she loved shoes. I wish I would have asked more about them. Can anyone enlighten/educate me? Thanks in advance.
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Just some idle backfilling.
I remember being intrigued by this pair of cantilevered shoes.
Designer Stefano Marazzini seems to have been capitalizing on a Space Age craze, and the name of the inventor of the cantilevered shoe is cited as Romeo Griffi (hence the name "Griffi" stamped in the insole):
http://www.thehistorialist.com/2014/09/ss33-1958-space-line-by-romeo-griffi.html
I'm not sure how Griffi's design differed enough from that of Martin Friedmann Jr.'s earlier patent (indeed, Friedmann's is cited in Griffi's):
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2958962
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2424609
The other curiosity is the spelling in the ad depicted in Jacque1953's post. Du Barry is spelled as "DU BARRJ."
It doesn't appear that Marazzini himself spelled it that way:
http://dati.acs.beniculturali.it/oad/uodMarchi/MR139028
It looks like perhaps whoever made the ad was a bit old-fashioned and used a "J" instead of an "I," which would have been more usual in late 1950s Italian (there is neither a "J" nor a "Y" character in modern Italian):
https://www.busuu.com/en/italian/alphabet
*snip*
Off topic, also note that “j” exists in the Italian spelling as a variant of the letter “i” to be used in certain circumstances.
The Italian language used the “j” sign with two different functions:
between vowels or at the beginning of a word to mark the semi-consonant value of an “i” (e.g., “jeri” instead of ieri, [“yesterday”])
at the end of a word, as a plural ending to nouns ending in atonic -io (e.g., “varj” instead of “vari” as the plural of “vario” [“various”]) to avoid confusion, in certain cases, with other words (e.g., “vari” plural of “varo” [the cerimonial launch of a ship]).
In both functions, the use of “j” in Italian words has almost completely disappeared between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. It still appears in the official spelling of family names (e.g., Ojetti, because that's the spelling that was recorded by the registry office) and proper nouns (e.g., Ajaccio). Many preserve their initial “j”, without a consistent criterion (e.g., Jacopo).
*snip*
https://www.quora.com/If-there-is-no-letter-J-in-the-Italian-alphabet-why-is-club-Juventus-written-like-that
While modern Italian has largely scuttled the letter "J," Modern English only picked it up after Shakespeare's time.
On Shakespeare's alleged tombstone, "Jesus" is spelled "Iesus":
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/mar/23/shakespeare-stolen-skull-grave-robbing-tale-true