MY HAND-MADE VIVIER BOOT? UNE FOLIE FINANCIERE, SAID ULTRA VIOLET


Dalì returns to the hotel for his siesta - that’s how he keeps going well into the night with sparkling energy - and drops me at Roger Vivier, the custom shoe and boot maker. I order the most expensive silver leather boots, with square toes and two seams running from tip to top. My feet are measured with infinite care and sketched.
The boots resemble the foreleg of a horse’s suit of armor. I pay seven hundred dollars for the pair, une foile financière, never to be repeated. (I use the money from the commission I receive from selling a Dali sketch.) They turn out to be so excruciatingly painful that I only wear them about three times.

The boots are bought to go with my silver outfit - silver metal miniskirt, silver blazer, silver stockings, silver boots. Sometimes I paint my front teeth silver, streak my hair with silver spray, and wear silver eye shadow. I carry a sterling-silver attache casé. I also have a silver evening coat with a silver-fox collar, silver underwear, handkerchief, nightgown. Make no mistake about it: I will be noticed.


Ultra Violet (AKA Isabelle Collin Dufresne, 1935 - 2014)
From: Famous For 15 Minutes. My Years With Andy Warhol (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, 1988)
 

1968 | Roger Vivier | NOT the boot described above
Silver Lamé Platform Cuissard
Source: Aguttes

Gradually, we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (co-incidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York art world, and then when he died, she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet.

Andy Warhol
From: POPism by Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett (1980)


1968 | Roger Vivier
Silver Lamé Platform Cuissard
Source: Aguttes

Ultra Violet & Andy Warhol looking at the boot


 

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