A walk through Stuart Weitzman’s Philadelphia, and private shoe collection

DOYLESTOWN — Stuart Weitzman is in my ear talking about high heels.

Hard by the Nakashima room, past the gift shop with the nostalgically thick Michener tomes — Chesapeake! The Source! Iberia! — through the Rainbow Room gallery where local guest curators grapple with depictions of gender and queerness, and there you come upon it: Walk This Way: Stuart Weitzman’s and Jane Gershon Weitzman’s private collection of shoes throughout history, on display at the Michener Art Museum through Jan. 15, 2023.

Stuart Weitzman, 81, the iconic shoe designer, competitive Ping-Pong player, Wharton Class of 1963, and, in ever-expanding fashion, Philadelphia philanthropist, is explaining heels. It is, in large part, heels that brought him to this moment.

“High heels make a good pair of legs look great or a great pair of legs look fabulous,” he says on the audio guide. “The high heel will always be with us.”

It’s a bit of a disconnect that curator Laura Turner Igoe acknowledges, especially if you walk into the exhibit the way I did, directly from the compelling and contemplative work of Joan W. Lindley’s abstracted nude painting entitled Ritual or the exploration of masculinity in The Boxing Scenes #1-3 from Julian Sabara.

“It’s a little disorienting,” she says.

On a recent visit by invitation of the Michener, she said, Weitzman himself appreciated “the deeper dive.”

“I tell people, come for the shoes, stay for the history,” she said. “They’re fabulous designs. The exhibition’s argument is you can learn about history, women’s history, labor history, design history, through the shoes. It’s more than just the shoes.”

These days, Stuart Weitzman and the Weitzman name seem to be everywhere in the Philly region, and not only on those text message ads that pop up daily on my phone, like the one urging me to “complete your cold-weather wardrobe with the over-the-knee boot everyone wants.”

But what does Stuart Weitzman want with Philadelphia?

A native of Massachusetts, Weitzman did not make himself available for this story, though he did not rule out a future meeting. He was recently at Haverford College speaking to students, and at Penn, where he helped break ground on a new building that will be “a place for aspiring artists and architects, landscape architects and energy policy experts, urban planners and historic preservationists,” on the same day he held one of his regular seminars on innovation and entrepreneurship. He’s held similar ones at Princeton and Dartmouth.

At Dartmouth, according to the Tuck Business School website, Weitzman emphasized the importance of imagination, innovation within a corporation, hiring employees who are “communicative and nice,” a strong leadership team, and risk taking.

It’s Penn, though, that he calls his “third daughter.” And the feel of a beaming smile of a proud and generous parent is evident in multiple places on the campus, including the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the Stuart Weitzman Plaza along 34th Street, and that newly renamed Weitzman Hall, formerly Morgan Hall, a historic and architecturally significant building on 34th Street that once was an orphanage. It will be renovated into a state-of-the-art facility for Weitzman School of Design students.

He’s also paying for a new Black Box theater, the Stuart Weitzman Theatre, that Penn hopes will increase the visibility of the performing arts in the relatively underutilized Annenberg Center part of campus.

Most prominently, his name is on Philly’s Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, where a $20 million donation allowed the struggling museum at Fifth and Market to buy its building, leave bankruptcy, and stay open, albeit only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Admission is free.

As he told The Inquirer in a May interview, Weitzman sold an extremely rare Double Eagle gold piece, a unique stamp, and another block of four stamps at Sotheby’s for a reported $32 million to save the museum.

That donation also allowed him to tweak the museum’s display in the Only in America gallery hall of fame, removing Ethel Rosenberg’s portrait. The Rosenberg saga is dealt with extensively deeper in the museum, whose more compelling exhibits involve global Jewish immigration patterns and documenting the complicated American response to the Holocaust in real time.

He told The Inquirer he called up his friend, another fashion mogul turned Philly philanthropist, Sidney Kimmel, who had just stepped down as museum board chair, and said, “ ‘Sidney, I’m looking at 15 renowned Americans on a screen here [at the museum], and one of the pictures in the lower right corner is Ethel Rosenberg,’ ” Weitzman said.

“I said, ‘What in the world is that museum thinking? Ethel Rosenberg? Known? Yes. Renowned? No. And he said, ‘Hey, I don’t know. I helped build the place 20 years ago, but I don’t run it. But would you send me a shot of that screen?’ And within a week her picture was down.” (Woody Allen remains in a prominent position on a gallery wall).

In any case, the first face you see on your way is not Weitzman’s or Ethel Rosenberg’s, but that of his friend Kimmel, whose company, Jones Apparel, acquired a majority share of Weitzman Shoes in 2010.

In 2015, Stuart Weitzman LLC was sold to Coach (renamed Tapestry in 2018). Weitzman remained a shoe designer and creative director through May 2017, and chairman emeritus though 2018.

A bronze bust of Kimmel is displayed just past the entryway, and the wall text praises Kimmel’s “instinct for style and design,” that took him “from South Philly to founder and CEO of fashion industry icon, Jones Apparel Group.”

Like Kimmel, Weitzman is leaving his footprints all over Philly.

But not only Philly. Weitzman is also supporting the development of a museum in Madrid dedicated to Spanish-Jewish history, and he sponsors a speaker series at Penn on “high-impact philanthropy.” And not for nothing, Weitzman was a recent medalist at the Maccabiah Games in Masters Table Tennis.

Back in Doylestown, curator Igoe says the Michener has put on fashion exhibitions every few years, which “tend to be pretty popular.”

This collection comes from the New York Historical Society, but the Michener dug deeper into the collection that Jane Weitzman began with gifts to inspire her shoe-designing husband, teasing out historical themes of women’s suffrage, labor, women designers, consumerism, practicality vs. visual appeal, Hollywood, celebrity, gender norms, drag history, and, naturally, a touch of Cinderella.

It focuses not necessarily on Weitzman but on unheralded designers like Beth Levine, “The First Lady of Shoe Design,” who started as a model with a size 4 foot and then had her own brand under her husband’s name, Herbert Levine Inc. You see her open-toe mules from the mid-1950s made of crystals, leather, and elastic “Spring-O-Lator,” one of her most famous innovations, an elastic device that prevented backless shoes from falling off the foot.

Another Beth Levine classic is Girl Crazy pumps of the 1960s, heralded in a 1966 Cincinnati Enquirer headline: “Don’t Knock Plastic Shoes,” giving legs and feet “that all-in-one sweep that’s a must with the short-short skirts.”

The exhibit also highlights Jan Ernst Matzeliger, the son of an enslaved Black woman and a Dutch engineer, who was born on a coffee plantation in Suriname, and invented a machine that mechanically attached a shoe’s leather upper to its sole, transforming the industry.

Among the Weitzmans on display are his 1972 open-toe, ankle-strap sequined evening shoes, which the exhibit notes were made in Elda, Spain, after Weitzman moved the production side of his company overseas.