Olga Berluti makes the most beautiful men’s shoes in the world — and if you don’t believe me, take a peek in one of Berluti’s London branches. You’ll gaze in awe at the elegant lines and the burnished deep, layered finish and go: “Wow! When I’m rich that’s what I’ll wear all the time.” Then you’ll walk away sadly because you’ll know it’s never going to happen. Not when a basic pair of ready-to-wear shoes costs a minimum of £470 and a pair of bespoke ones upwards of £2,200.

According to Berluti, though, when we meet in her Paris atelier, there are quite a few non-rich people out there who buy her shoes. “Today young people with no money save and save till they can afford them,” she says.

It’s Berluti’s view that a shoe isn’t a proper shoe until it has been worn for at least 20 years — the point when it takes on its owner’s personality. So even for your bespokes, you’re paying only £110 a year.You’d agree it’s worth it if you tried on a pair – as I did in Berluti’s atelier. To wear they’re like ballet pumps. The fine calf leather has been tanned to such feathery lightness you could almost be barefoot — and the fit is perfect.

Berluti fitted me herself, which she does purely by eye and instinct. A few delicate touches, a glance at the soles of the shoes I had on, and she knew everything. No wonder Andy Warhol was so smitten.

Warhol was her first customer. It was 1962 and Berluti was 17, working in the shop that her Italian great-grandfather Alessandro had founded in 1895. She wasn’t allowed near the workshops; instead Olga would sweep and dust and, as a special treat, be allowed to polish back to life customers’ old shoes. One day, the unknown Warhol was brought in by his friend Yves St Laurent. “He sketched something square and impossible and said, ‘This is what I want’ . He placed the order. But when grandfather came back from lunch he threw the order in the bin because I had forgotten to take a deposit.”

She burst into tears. An old worker took pity on her, retrieved the order, and secretly helped her to make up Warhol’s design. When she had the courage to show them to her grandfather, he said: “Too long. Too square. The leather is scarred: dustbin.”

Warhol was furious when he came in weeks later and was told that the order had not been processed. But Berluti approached him with the shoes that she had made. “They fitted him to perfection. He was so happy he began dancing in them. It was destiny,” she says.

In the early days, when the company’s clientele included everyone from Toulouse-Lautrec to the Duke of Windsor, 80 per cent of its shoes were black and the rest chestnut brown. It was Berluti who introduced the more experimental finishes — smoked blacks, blue greys, yellow-browns, and grey-greens — and styles (tattooed with calligraphy; scarred like African tribesmen, etc) for which the shoemaker is renowned today.

The polishing techniques she invented herself and they are a closely-guarded secret. She keeps all her magic ingredients in old Guerlain perfume bottles in her atelier, watched over by a dummy dressed as a samurai, and her personally decorated wooden lasts (ie, the blocks from which bespoke shoes are made) of famous old customers.

They include Richard Burton, Mr Royce (of Rolls-Royce) and Toulouse-Lautrec; Warhol is the only customer with five lasts because he kept changing his mind.

Berluti is at 43 Conduit Street, W1 (020-7437 1740); and 4 Harriet Street, SW1 (020-7823 2300).

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