Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
In a shoemaker’s shop in the US city of Los Angeles, yellow boxes hold foot-shaped moulds. For over 50 years, these moulds were used to make shoes for important people in America’s entertainment capital.
One stack has the foot moulds of famous US actors like Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford.
“There’s a bit of everybody here,” said shoemaker Chris Francis, the custodian of the famous moulds. Francis got the collection a few years after the 2008 death of Pasquale Di Fabrizio, known as the “shoemaker to the stars”.
But in a changing world, such craftsmanship is not always rewarded. Francis, 48, said many shoemakers had given up making footwear from scratch and now just fix the mass-produced shoes that put them out of business.
