Isabella Bowie designed her first pair of shoes when she was 12 years old. “They were bad. Terrible, in fact,” she tells me over coffee. “The drawing is still in my mom’s cupboard.” Now 30, Bowie has been designing shoes ever since. Last July, she launched her own brand, Izie. In a world dominated by sneakers and clogs, her premise is ambitious. “I want to bring the heel back.”
Since launching, Bowie has created five designs, all named after landmarks in the cities she’s lived in, from London, where she is based, to New York. On March 26, she released the Arno, a play on strappy sandals. Her signature shoe, the Port sandal, is inspired by Enzo Mari, the Milanese industrial designer. “I think shoes are a lot more about product design than fashion,” she says.
To tackle the issue of comfort, Bowie created her signature “I” heel, a thick, half-moon shape. “It still looks sleek, unlike a wedge, but you have that extra support.” She also adds padding around the toes.
Fashion runs in Bowie’s blood. Her mother, Sally Bowie, studied costume design and worked as a seamstress. Growing up in London, Bowie would draw with her mom on weekends. “She used to buy those little rolls of brown paper, roll it out, then just let me spend all day painting.” Bowie’s mother made dresses and suits in matching prints for herself and would take Bowie to the cobbler, fabric in tow, to make coordinating shoes. “She’d be wearing an orange suit, with matching orange, cool sandals.”
“I want to bring the heel back.”
After graduating from high school, in 2012, Bowie moved to New York to study fashion design at Parsons. Her first summer, she took a one-month internship at Mariano Rubinacci, in Naples, a renowned tailor that has dressed the city’s aristocrats for the last century. Bowie worked diligently, sewing in lining and basting for custom suits.
In 2015, while interning at the New York–based handbag company Carlos Falchi, she came to love accessory designing. “I was working at the factory, sitting in the area where the handbags are assembled. And at five P.M., when everything closed, they would teach me to create.”
After graduating, in 2016, she took a job as an assistant footwear designer at Calvin Klein in New York. Working at a large company that outsourced its manufacturing, Bowie felt too disconnected from the end product. Two years later, she moved to London, where she started working for the luxury shoe brand Sophia Webster.
Then the pandemic hit. The demand for footwear dropped. Sophia Webster “decided to hold their stock, so my job was suddenly redundant. That’s when I thought, O.K., what am I going to do?” Bowie applied for a master’s at Polimoda, a private fashion school near the Arno in Florence.
Her time in Italy proved revelatory. “I’d come from New York and London, where everything is done on a computer and we digitize it,” she says. “I suddenly went back to drawing by hand and being totally in control. The Italians … the teachers treat it as an art form. They always say, Piano, piano—slowly, slowly.”
After a long search for a factory, a friend connected her with a 78-year-old artisan based out of Forlì, near Bologna, who has been making shoes for six decades. “His hands are wise beyond belief,” Bowie says. She made her first collection with recycled stock materials, then moved back to London, where she organized a pop-up in a café near her house, in Islington. For Christmas, she hosted another in Belgravia.
Though the brand is small and self-funded—for now—Bowie is hopeful that this level of quality will resonate with a wide audience. “I think with successful brands today, it’s not necessarily about the product anymore,” she says. “It’s about the world that the product creates. And I think the product should be at the center of the conversation again.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL