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At Berluti Dinner in Paris, a Case of Eat Your Shoe

When Alessandro Sartori’s last model left the Berluti catwalk at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the show was far from over. A hundred guests moved through to an adjacent gallery to aid in the re-creation of the Swann Club, a semi-regular dinner party hosted by Olga Berluti that would culminate in a shoe-polishing session. Dining and shining—it sounds like a fetishist’s dream, and the ceremony of the Berluti dinner did little to dispel that impression, from the moment we were called upon to dispense with our footwear before we were seated.

When we did sit, there were shoe boxes in front of the place settings stocked with what looked like shoe creams and polishes. I’m normally pretty averse to a chef-ly preamble to dinner, but in this case we needed Michelin master Thierry Marx’s guidance. Those things in the box were actually sauces and dressings for the meal that was to come. Even forewarned, it was still a strange sensation to pop off the top of a can of “shoe polish” and eat the jet black contents (actually an eggplant concoction); one fellow diner remained convinced till dessert that she’d just consumed boot black.

But the culinary fun and games were a mere prelude to the ritual of the shoe-polishing. Our shoes were painstakingly returned to us on silver platters, whereupon we were given a lesson in footwear maintenance. The likes of Bryan Ferry, Antoine Arnault, Jefferson Hack, and Maurizio Cattelan obediently followed instructions, dabbing and buffing. I say “our shoes,” but I lie. I was wearing trainers. Nevertheless, the importance of being kind to my footwear was not lost on me. Now I just have to get the shoes to be kind to.

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