Third-generation Spanish shoemaker Pedro García stopped by Nordstrom Houston to host a pop-up shop and debut his new spring/summer collection, giving customers the chance to buy shoes from the new line before anyone else.
The nearly 100-year-old brand was started by García's grandfather, who shares his name, before passing to his father and then to him. Today, Pedro's sister Mila is the CEO, and he's the creative director, continuing the family tradition and using high-quality satin, suede, Vachetta leather and crystal to make their iconic silhouettes. The shoes are made at the company’s factory in Spain and sold at retailers internationally.
The new collection features beautiful wedges, high heels, sandals, slides, and sneakers. Everything is stylish and fun, but our favorites are his light, thin-strapped sandals adorned with Swarovski crystals, his comfy, trendy slides, and his 'Parson' satin sneakers, perfect with jeans or even a dress.
We wandered the cocktail party and chatted with a few fans of García's shoes. “We ... love Pedro’s brand, because when you're running around from appointment to appointment, you need something that’s comfortable but still very stylish,” Nina, a styling manager for Nordstrom, told us. “I was never a wedge girl until Pedro’s wedge. I've always been a super-high-heel, skinny-stiletto girl. But now I am obsessed with the wedge.”
“I’ve been buying Pedro’s shoes for about eight years, and I would say about 40 percent of my shoes are from him," added Victoria Brown senior director of Weingarten Realty. "What I love about his brand is that it’s so versatile. I wear it to the theater, to work, to the ranch."
Houstonia caught up with García and asked a few questions about his new line.
What makes this collection different from the others—are there any dramatic changes?
From one collection to the other, there is always an evolution. We have our favorite materials, which we keep investigating—getting a little bit more deep into each one of them. So I would say maybe the satin that we investigated a little bit more.
The disco slide is one of my favorite styles. Was this something brand-new?
I think one of the nice things about the way we work in the studio is that we have a big archive, so nothing is thrown away. When you’re finished with something you’re not really finished with it, you put it away and maybe in two years, you’re going to look at it in a different way, and you add a little something different. For us it’s good to have a nice archive to be able to keep evolving, so the disco thing is something that we worked three or four seasons ago. And then we said, "Let’s bring it back because it’s still fun, and it still works with the trends."
Even though this is a spring/summer collection, you've stayed with the neutrals, as opposed to the typical bright colors of the season.
Yes, it truly depends on the color because not every color works with materials that we use. These limitations become inspirations. You want to use a specific material, you have to adapt to the material itself. I was always said that we’ve always been very influenced by the fact that we have our own factory. It’s not something that we sketch and we send the sketch to a factory. No, it’s a very, very, very different story for us—the fact that we sketch, and then we cut, the shoe, and we go through the process. We see how it’s being stitched, we resolve the problems along the way. This a big advantage. We consider ourselves very much shoemakers; we are designing a collection, but designing is about the whole process.
The satin is one of your signature materials used. Can you tell me about the technique that is used?
We treated it in a more unconventional way: You cut it raw, and then the satin becomes frayed. Satin has been normally associated with evening, but what we did was bring it into the daylight. You can wear it with jeans; you can wear it with flat shoes.
Why did you pick Houston for one of your three pop-up shops?
Houston is one of our best [markets] in the U.S. The women from here really understand the brand, and the weather fits very well with the collection that we make. We are very happy to be here.
Visit the pop-up shop through Nov. 5 at Nordstrom Galleria. Every purchase includes a free gift.
