On Day-Lewis at Stefano Bemer

Daniel Day-Lewis spent eight months between 1999 and 2000 as an apprentice in the workshop of Stefano Bemer, the Florentine bespoke shoemaker whose name is now carried forward by the firm that survived him. The apprenticeship was apprenticeship, undertaken on its own terms, and it is among the more admirable instances in modern celebrity of a man with the means to do anything choosing, instead, to do one thing properly. 

How a man finds his way into a workshop 

Day-Lewis had been introduced to Bemer’s work by his shoemaker in London, who had sent him to Florence for a fitting some years earlier. The fitting became a friendship. The friendship became a recurring visit. The visits, eventually, became the question of whether the actor might stay long enough to actually learn what the workshop did. Bemer agreed. Day-Lewis moved his family from London to Florence and took rooms near the workshop. 

What he did at the bench was what every apprentice does. He cut leather. He pulled lasts. He worked the welt. He learned to read a foot by hand. He made mistakes that an apprentice three weeks in would not make and was corrected, in the workshop’s manner, with the patience the work requires. He did not become a shoemaker. No man becomes a shoemaker in eight months. He became, however, something the trade recognises immediately: a true fan of the art. 

What the actor was really doing 

The instinct of the press at the time was to read the stay as an actor’s research, an inhabiting of a role he had not yet been offered. The reading was wrong. Day-Lewis had not been cast as a shoemaker. There was no shoemaker film in development. He had simply found, in the workshop, the thing the actor’s life is built around — a focus of attention sustained, daily, on a thing being made by hand — and he wanted to be present for it. 

Stefano Bemer, who passed away in 2012 at fifty-one, was the natural partner for such a stay. He had taken over his own workshop young, had taught himself the difficult corrections that came after his early training, and had spent the rest of his working life elevating the standard of what a Florentine bespoke shoemaker could do. He took one apprentice from outside the trade, and the apprentice happened to be one of the most decorated actors of his generation. 

What the stay means 

Day-Lewis did not turn his apprenticeship into a foundation or a product line. He kept the shoes he had made and the lasts he had pulled. He went back, occasionally, when the rest of his life permitted it. The stay was not a story he was telling about himself. It was a thing he had done, the way a man does a thing because it is worth doing. 

The workshop is still there. The firm that carries Bemer’s name has continued the work he was doing, and trains apprentices in the school he founded shortly before his death. What remains is the long, quiet discipline of the trade itself — and the memory of a moment, twenty-five winters ago, when the most famous actor of his generation pulled a stool up to a bench in Florence, and was, for a little under a year, the most punctual man in the shop.