The designer with her F/W10 collection
There’s an understated jolie-laide to the shoes created by Tiffany Tuttle for her Los Angeles-based label LD Tuttle. They are intricate yet simple, involved yet easy-to-wear. Their functionable/fashionable duality is perhaps a result of her comprehensive design background. After studying fashion design at FIT and working in apparel design, Tuttle decided to pave her own path, entering the highly technical world of footwear via the Ars Sutoria school in Milan. Here she learned skills such as shoe patternmaking and construction. In 2005 the designer brought it all together, launching LD Tuttle with her husband, Richard Lidinsky. “The LD in the name stands for his initials, whereas Tuttle is my last name,” she reveals. Tuttle now splits her time jetting between Los Angeles and two factories in Northern Italy just outside of Milan, where her signature distressed boots and strappy sandals are produced.
For F/W10, Tuttle designed tough platform boots, wedges, low-heeled booties and a handful of unisex styles in her usual moody palette of black and grey with splashes of yellow, green and navy, paired with unusual artisanal details such as handknit leather and parchment. The inspiration for the collection came from a variety of sources, including pictures of old fossils, gemstone shows, Baroque paintings and a 1200-page biography of Rembrandt, which Tuttle says fascinated her. “I was thinking about this idea of protection and preserving things,” she notes. “The collection is usually about that: a feeling of heaviness but also, through use of unlined leathers, a lightness and suppleness.” In a first for her label, the designer developed a process of knitting long strips of leather by hand, which she says “is nice because it has this protective cocoony effect but an openness where you see skin, so there’s a certain sexiness.”
While Tuttle often begins designing each shoe with a preliminary sketch, she mostly works by draping on a last. “A lot of my shoes are about the leather and how it moves,” she elaborates. “So when I have an idea, I’ll take leather, starting cutting it and draping. To me, it’s important to see how it drapes on the foot and where straps will go.” The same hands-on approach applies to her work building heels: “I work with a heel maker that sculpts by hand at first, so it’s all very organic.”
In addition to her signature collection, Tuttle collaborates with labels like VPL and Louise Gray, but she maintains a strict code that shoe design should enhance, not overwhelm the wearer. “Certain people are inspirations for me,” Tuttle clarifies. “My sister is one. She works at an art gallery and has this easy style, which I think is really cool. She looks amazing, but it’s never really thought out. Everything is a bit messy, but her personality always shines through. I want our customers to feel the same way: yes, the shoes are special, but it’s not all about the shoe. It should be about the person, too.”
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