Lamborghini designer Walter de Silva drives into women’s shoes

Walter de Silva is nowhere close to retirement. The legendary car designer with more than 40 years of experience dived right into a brand-new design realm just one day after leaving Volkswagen Group where he had served as chief designer for the past decade.

To everyone’s surprise, de Silva’s new venture has little to do with the futuristic concept cars he created for Lamborghini and Audi – he has designed a collection of women’s stilettos.

“When I retired [from Volkswagen] I said to my wife that instead of going to the doctors, I prefer to go design shoes,” says de Silva in his showroom at the Ritz Paris.

The collection of 30 styles was first shown during Paris Fashion Week in September last year and will be exclusively available at Barneys New York in March.

“I want to design shoes especially for the evening – shoes to be worn from 6pm to 2am,” he says. “For me, a whole new world begins after 6pm. [I design] shoes for women to wear to cocktails, dinners, drinks and dances.”

The collection features a series of stilettos with a signature sculpted ultraslim heel. While the shoes are mostly in black rendered in a variety of textures from leather to satin, linen and even carbon fibre, they are all lined with a sharp orange hue inside. The brand name is embroidered on a strip of jacquard silk.

“Black marks the beginning of my new job because black is sexy, extreme and elegant,”
de Silva says.

Having created iconic cars such as the Audi A5, Lamborghini Egoista and Lamborghini Miura, de Silva’s new-found passion for shoes stems from his family business. He says shoemaking is something that they talk about a lot in his family, and he wants to offer his creativity to elegant ladies.