Casadei

Casadei began in 1958 in a small workshop in San Mauro Pascoli, in Emilia-Romagna's shoemaking district, where founders Quinto and Flora Casadei made sandals for tourists visiting the Italian Riviera. Within a decade the workshop had grown into a specialized footwear business exporting to Germany and the United States; by the 1970s it was advertising internationally, exporting to Japan, and in 1977 opened its first single-brand store, in Brussels. In 1994 the founders' son, Cesare Casadei, joined the company as creative director, marking a generational handover that shaped the label's later design direction. The house's best-known product is the Blade, launched in 2011: a stiletto reworked around an extremely thin, structurally engineered steel heel rather than a conventional solid form, which became one of the more widely imitated heel designs in contemporary luxury footwear. Quinto Casadei, the label's founder, died at age 88, as reported by WWD's footwear trade desk. Casadei remains headquartered and produced in San Mauro Pascoli, continuing to operate as a family-linked house within the Emilia-Romagna footwear manufacturing belt.