MILAN — Being the height of fashion for 50 years is quite a claim. Cleo, the fanciful shoe designed by the Venetian haute cobbler René Caovilla, with its sinuous strap coiling up the ankle, is celebrating just that: half a century on the soles of partygoers.
It has been worn by the likes of Mary J. Blige, Lizzo, Zendaya and Jessica Chastain. Kim Kardashian ordered a custom pair to celebrate her 40th birthday and Rihanna wore a pair of bespoke Cleo sandals when she introduced her Fenty Beauty line. Rare is the designer who can offer a pair of shoes that wouldn’t look out of place at a Doge ball or in a TikTok dance-off.
René Caovilla may not roll off the tongue like Jimmy Choo or Manolo Blahnik, nor have made it into a rap, but this Venetian family business has one advantage. Its defining style, its snake or “chandelier” stiletto with the glittery sole, is synonymous with the brand and its founder. Pat Field, the stylist and costume designer, wrote in an email that she prized Mr. Caovilla’s shoes alongside those of Christian Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik. “He will join them earning the status of a household named shoe designer,” she wrote.
At 85, and still the company president, Mr. Caovilla certainly has put in the footwork.
Many have copied the distinctive style, but it was Mr. Caovilla who invented the house’s original in 1973.
In a Milan showroom last week, Giorgia Caovilla, the chief executive, Mr. Caovilla’s daughter and the third generation of the family to head the company, contemplated its longevity. She suggested that only Chanel possessed such an evergreen shoe style. (The French fashion house introduced the classic two-tone pump emblematic of Parisian chic in 1957 and it has been a constant ever since.) The Cleo continues to be one of the brand’s best-selling models and Ms. Caovilla said she was thrilled that her 16-year-old daughter has taken to wearing it with jeans.
To celebrate the shoe, the house is mounting a retrospective of its archival designs on Friday, during Milan Fashion Week, and releasing a book titled “The Art of Dreams: Cleo, a Style Icon for 50 Years.” Unlike footwear labels that are compulsively driven to reinvent their designs each season, Cleo is a style stalwart, although each season brings variations, in a variety of heights, many of which are to be displayed.
To celebrate its half-century milestone, there will be a made-to-order Cleo with 700 diamonds in a mix of marquise cuts totaling 13.20 carats. Applied by hand to red satin, the two diamond pieces at the top and bottom of the strap resemble brooches that wouldn’t look out of a place on a Venetian principessa. Ms. Caovilla said that the label’s next step may be to recreate removable jewelry pieces for shoes.
There is nothing of the hidden luxe about the Cleo. Seemingly no variation is considered too flamboyant, frivolous or froufrou. Iterations have taken cues from all manner of Italian culture, from a Renaissance brocade woven in the time of Tintoretto to a 16th-century Domenico Beccafumi painting. A Murano chandelier in the Doge’s Palace in Venice was the starting point for a spiraling ankle strap of rhinestone droplets.
The company was founded in 1934 by Edoardo Caovilla, René’s father, who opened a workshop outside Venice to hand-craft luxury footwear. Ms. Caovilla said the footwear is still made in a Palladian villa close to the town of Fiesso d’Artico, where wealthy Venetians once spent their summers and which has been a shoemaking heartland since the glory days of the Republic of Venice. In the 1950s, Edoardo’s son René took the helm after studying in Paris and London. On his return to Italy, he met Valentino Garavani and went on to produce shoes for the house for three decades.
The idea for the Cleo came from a coiled serpent bangle dated to first century B.C. Rome that Mr. Caovilla saw on a visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. How, he wondered, could he transform the spiraling snake design to a shoe strap? On his return home, he dismantled an alarm clock to examine its springs and set about understanding how a spiral strap could retain its elasticity.
Two years after its introduction, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City exhibited the Cleo, marking its feat of artistry.
The brand said that each pair takes about two days to craft by hand. Wear them and you could be a 15th-century Venetian riding your gilded gondola to a masked ball in a marble palace, or a TikTok influencer like @wewantcaovilla posting from London. It is one of footwear’s most blatantly knocked-off designs. A genuine pair retails from $1,290, although bespoke jeweled styles can reach $30,000.
In 2004, Mr. Caovilla designed a serpentine ankle-wrapped sandal for the Sultan of Brunei that featured a snake-shaped jewel in diamonds and sapphires. The snake’s eyes were cast with rubies.
On a phone call, Mr. Caovilla was reflective. With decades in the business, he acknowledged that the important thing is “to keep moving forward.”
And he has. His newest version of the Cleo takes the coiling snake underneath the shoe’s silvery sole for the first time.
“The snake can be seen when you cross or uncross your legs,” he said.
