Meet the woman making Victorian era-style shoes in LA for $800 a pair

• Shoemaker Vicky D'Incecco specializes in making shoes from the Victorian era.
• Her period-appropriate footwear takes as long as three weeks to make and sells for around $800 a pair.
• She's hoping her shoes appeal to consumers turning away from fast fashion and mass-marketed clothing.

Vicky D'Incecco is hand-crafting traditional Victorian footwear — in modern-day LA.

It's an age-old craft that D'Incecco has kept alive in a world of fast fashion and mass manufacturing. As far as she knows, D'Incecco is the only Victorian shoemaker left in the US.

"We don't see those silhouettes anymore," she told Business Insider Today. "The shoe forms are completely different now. It's one of my life projects, is to try to recreate those silhouettes that we found in that era with those curves and the curvy arch and the curvy — just all the curves."

D'Incecco brings her designs to life mostly by using antique tools she managed to find on eBay. It takes the shoemaker up to three weeks to complete just one pair of her Victorian creations, between stitching, cutting, and sanding the model down.

"When you look at a shoe off the shelf at a random retail store, generally, maybe they're not real leather, or the shank is made of cardboard, or the stiffeners are very commonly made of plastic," she said. "So those are on that level, that difference."

D'Incecco started her career as a designer for an Italian shoemaker working directly with factories. She was so curious and passionate about the process of making a shoe that she decided to learn for herself.

She began absorbing information from shoemaking blogs and video tutorials, and said she eventually began working with another local shoemaker who helped her fine-tune her skills.

Now, she makes videos of her own showcasing her work. She has clients in the US, Singapore, and Japan, and they mostly find her through Instagram and YouTube, she said. Much of her time is spent taking pictures, filming videos of her process, and even editing them herself.

The orders may be fairly sporadic — she's made 14 pairs of shoes so far this year — but she's able to support herself by charging around $800 for each one.

"I am making a living out of it. So basically the way that I do that is I'm able to work on several shoes at the same time, because they're all basically at different parts of the process," she said.

"Orders obviously come in as, you know, very sprinkled. And it depends on the person and the time of year. I do a lot of wedding shoes and things like that that are more special occasions.

Despite the hefty price tag, her business did not take a hit during the pandemic thanks to a sweeping change in the retail world.

"I know the fast fashion is creating a big problem, and everybody's sort of waking up to the fact that fast fashion is damaging the planet, and it is not well made, so therefore it doesn't last very long," she said. "I know a lot of people learning new crafts and things like that, just so that we can sort of get back down to a place where we're consuming less, but we're consuming better."

And although she doesn't necessarily romanticize the Victorian era — "obviously things are better now socially, politically, all that stuff," she said — D'Incecco is able to travel back in time with each pair she makes.

"In terms of the fashion and the architecture and the music, I just — I love it," she said. "I think it's so beautiful."