Stepping in Tune

From scooping gelato to DJing at a local radio station in rural Italy to designing shoes for the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna, Giuseppe Zanotti’s life has been anything but ordinary. We caught up with the designer on his first visit to Asia post-Covid to talk muses and music

- Coco Marett

“I was a loser DJ,” Zanotti tells Tatler as we sit down to chat in the Presidential Suite at Fullerton Bay Hotel in Singapore. He’s seated in a lounge chair, wearing his signature black, thick-framed glasses.

Before becoming one of the world’s most celebrated shoe designers, Zanotti started his career as a DJ for an independent radio station in his hometown in Italy, essentially working for free because he would “spend all [his] money buying records”.

Zanotti grew up in San Mauro Pascoli, a coastal town one hour south of Bologna that’s known for shoe manufacturing. “It’s a beautiful summer place,” he says. His family owned a quaint restaurant and gelateria on the beach, where he would work during the peak season. “My father and mother had already written my destiny for me and my siblings—but this destiny felt too strange for me.”

Zanotti says he always had a penchant for design—whether that was sketching cars and bikes, or designing out-there ice cream cones for the family business—so after he left his career in radio, he began working for a local shoe company.

“Since I was a kid, I was amazed by people who work with their hands, the artisans,” he says. “I learnt everything, all the technical components … leather, the inside and outside, lining and upper, accessories and embroideries like jewels, stones, crystals. Shoes are a whole universe.”

After cutting his teeth, he began designing shoes freelance for brands such as Gianfranco Ferré and Valentino. “At the time, I didn’t have the self-confidence to put my name on my shoes,” he says. “They were just shoes with no name.”