Made-to-order shoes with ice-like glass bead ties aren’t for everyone; for Ljubljana-based Leonora Jakovlevic, the spirit behind Ave Femina, they’re the mischievous realization of free-flight dreams.

Leonora is an artist: impulsive yet meticulous. She’s spontaneous, and doesn’t quite understand careerism. Instead she plays and improvises. She saves the meaning and the final shape for later. Once ‘later’ arrives, she creates images that sweep us off our feet. She creates stories and bids us enter with our shoes on – not barefoot; shoes through which we learn – and live – the story.
A shoe demands responsibility. All too often a girl – or woman – puts on high heels and becomes an object; not just an object in the eyes of others (the others are others), but in her own eyes as well. She becomes an object by herself, for herself. In the process she loses her spontaneity, simplicity, freedom.
The world upon a pedestal is, after all, different. A high heel is a pedestal, and a woman in heels is an object of admiration. A woman on a pedestal is not only taller, but suddenly becomes exalted, superior to those looking up to her and those just looking; superior to those willing to follow her or those wanting to seduce her.
But Leonora is not comfortable with this scenario, she’s seen enough of it. This is not the story of an individual, rather it’s the story of an exotic bird in captivity. A shoe should be an object that is subject to a woman with a will, a personality. A shoe without a woman is merely a promise of the attainable.
“Too often women ignore the shoe” says Leonora. “As strange as it may sound it’s true. They’re familiar with the status symbols at work, they know the brand. They know it assures them of quality and prestige. Women invest in symbolic capital. Only few of them dare to look beyond, where individualism resides, where their self is at home. Women don’t trust themselves; instead they’d rather follow trends.”
Is Ave Femina Leonore Mark a trend? No, she is ‘chic’. For a personality doesn’t change with the season. A personality is not trendy. The French, she says, understand this, the crucial difference in approach.

Leonora’s shoes are a promise of erotica. Real erotica begins with a gait, poise, and a rhythm dictated to the shoe by the woman. Whether she’s 16 or 60, a good shoe mistress knows how to tame a shoe. Timeless sex appeal is her reward. There are women out there who know this: young women, who want to be and, as such, already are different; and older women, who look for the beauty and quality of individual craft and care.
Alongside her driven creativity resides a girlish mischievousness. The protruding ears that refuse to cooperate with the tiny face crowning her slender figure are not the only indicators: it’s there in her story. Leonora follows her instincts; she can be very naughty, she gets crazy ideas into her head – and acts on them. She tells us of her dreams: she’ll move to an island she loves in Dalmatia, plant an herb garden, open up a small inn with a shoe shop. We believe every word she says.
Tonight she measures my feet. Now I’m waiting for my custom-made shoes: gold-rimmed, with a tie made of two glass-circles that look like broken ice. She says I’ll look like Mini Mouse, Micky’s girlfriend. I find that very very chic. But I still have the feeling that we’ll end up running around barefoot together in her Dalmatian herb garden.

Author: Lucija Stupica
Photos: Tomo Brejc, Luka Dekleva