Bernice Shaftan, who relished her career as a footwear designer and consultant for companies around the world, died on April 22. She was 99.
A native New Yorker, Shaftan studied fine art at The Art Students League and got her start in shoes at the age of 17. “The first day of work I was plunked down all alone in a buck room with one pencil and one piece of paper. I didn’t know if they’d give me more and I was scared to death to ask,” she recalled in a 1967 FN interview.
Shaftan went on to work with factories globally, developing original silhouettes, lasts, heel designs, new leather colors, textures and trimmings.
“If you are a professional, successful, commercial designer, you have to be a line builder,” she said in a 1976 roundtable with Vivian Infantino, FN’s then fashion director, and other designers. “I always feel the designer’s role is one of a liaison between sales and factory — to fight with the factory to make the things that they never want to make and to give sales the things that they need to sell.”
Shaftan loved to immerse herself in trends, creating seasonal booklets and conducting presentations for retailers. Her reports of European industry events were published in the major trade journals of the time, and Shaftan was a consultant for well-known footwear companies in the U.S., Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Germany, China, Portugal and Mexico.
In 1987, The Footwear and Accessories Council (FAC) named Shaftan as one of its women of the year. She had been president of the organization in 1967 and 1980, and also served as its chairman of the board. In addition, Shaftan was a founding member of Shoe Women Executives Inc., and also served as their President and Chairman of the Board.
Shaftan was also involved in a number of other major fashion organizations, including Fashion Group International (FGI). She was a volunteer for the advisory board of the High School of Fashion Industries and the fashion committee of the National Arts Club.
The designer was honored by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was a volunteer for more than 10 years. She donated 32 boxes of her archival work, sketches, written material, published interviews and articles to the museum, which is now part of its permanent collection. She also helped the museum catalog its extensive shoe collection.
“[She was] a creative independent woman, loving wife, inspiring mother, devoted grandmother, and compassionate friend,” said her daughter, Susan Shaftan Perrin. “She lived a wonderfully long life to the fullest: being a trailblazing professional in work she loved; enjoying and being a patron of the all the arts (fine & applied, theatre, ballet, modern dance, photography & film, jewelry and of course apparel); and living the true cosmopolitan lifestyle with her family and corgis in her penthouse studio in Gramercy Park. Bernice was a true original, endlessly imaginative and dynamic.”