Draft:Helene Verin

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Helene Verin
Born	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Wisconsin–Madison
Occupations	Shoe and product designer, author, curator, educator
Known for	Keds Championship Series shoe line; scholarship on Beth Levine
Notable work	Beth Levine Shoes (2009) Arsho Baghsarian: A Life in Shoes (2019)
Spouse	Rodney Ripps ​ ​ (m. 1979, divorced)​
Children	Ryder Ripps

Helene Verin is an American shoe and product designer, author, curator, and educator. She worked in the contemporary art world in the 1970s before entering footwear design in New York, and later taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her published work centers on two twentieth-century American women shoe designers, Beth Levine and Arsho Baghsarian, whose contributions she has argued were obscured by the male-named labels they designed under. Her best-known commercial design is a baseball-stitch shoe line produced under license by Keds.

Early life and education

Verin is originally from Chicago. She holds a Bachelor of Science in art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Art world career

Before working in design, Verin held positions with galleries, museums, and artists, including work with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; documenta in Kassel, Germany, where she worked with Joseph Beuys; and a role as registrar for the artist Dennis Oppenheim. She has written for Flash Art, Interview, and Smithsonian publications.

She moved to New York City in the late 1970s to become a shoe designer.

Design career

Keds baseball-stitch line

Verin states in her design portfolio that she created a licensed line for the Keds Corporation organized around baseball stitching, produced in men's, women's, and children's versions, and that the line sold more than 2.5 million pairs, worth over $120 million at retail. The line was marketed as the Keds Championship Series; the women's leather model was the Pennant Oxford.

The model has been reissued several times. In September 2011, Keds and Opening Ceremony reissued the Championship Series in three colorways with pinstripe lining, launched at Opening Ceremony's Fashion's Night Out event at the Ace Hotel New York; Refinery29 described the shoe as a fan favorite from the mid-1990s. The style continued in the Keds mainline as the Champion Pennant, and in 2016 Keds released a licensed Major League Baseball Champion Pennant collection covering eleven teams.

Consulting and licensing

Verin has designed shoes, wallpaper, rugs, pillows, and tiles; her publisher describes her design work as having appeared in numerous books and publications.

Teaching

Verin has been an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City.

Work on Beth Levine

Verin met Beth Levine (1914–2006) after moving to New York in the late 1970s. Levine was the principal designer behind Herbert Levine, the New York luxury shoe label named for her husband, who handled manufacturing, sales, and marketing while she designed. Writing for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Verin described Levine as a mentor and friend. After returning to New York in 1996, she visited Levine several times a week, working through her archives and recording her recollections; Levine gave her samples, ornaments, and press materials from the company's former factory storage. Verin has said she pursued the work because her FIT students had never heard of Levine.

Beth Levine Shoes (2009)

Verin's monograph Beth Levine Shoes, with photography by David Hamsley, was published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, in 2009. In Vogue, André Leon Talley highlighted the book's documentation of Levine's experimental designs, including stockinged boots extending into a bodysuit, Astroturf-lined slides, and driving pumps shaped like cars. The book is cited as a reference in accounts of the Herbert Levine company, including for appraisals of Levine by Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin.

Exhibitions

Verin has curated or co-curated three exhibitions on Levine:

• Beth Levine: The First Lady of Shoes, Dutch Leather and Shoe Museum, Waalwijk, Netherlands, 2009 (co-curated with Inge Specht).
• Beth Levine: First Lady of Shoes, Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington, 2010, featuring more than 100 pairs of shoes and boots.
• Beth Levine: The First Lady of Shoes, The Long Island Museum, Stony Brook, New York, August 21, 2015 – January 3, 2016, as guest curator. The exhibition comprised nearly 150 artifacts and works of art, anchored by Philip Pearlstein's 1985 portrait of Levine on loan from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Joshua Ruff, the museum's director of collections and interpretation, described Verin as "the perfect person to spearhead this effort." The exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times.

Arsho Baghsarian: A Life in Shoes (2019)

Verin's second book covers Arsho Baghsarian, who designed for four decades for labels including Christian Dior, Andrew Geller, I. Miller, and Stuart Weitzman. Published by Schiffer Fashion Press, it reproduces sketches, prototypes, and production shoes Baghsarian donated to FIT; Stuart Weitzman wrote the introduction and Karen Trivette, head of FIT Special Collections, the foreword.

Portraits by Warhol and Pearlstein

Verin sat for Andy Warhol around 1979–1980. A preparatory Polaroid from the sitting, catalogued as Verin, Helene (Mrs. Rodney Ripps) and dated April 1980, is held in the permanent collection of the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The resulting painting, Portrait of Helene Verin (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas), was exhibited by Betty Cuningham Gallery in Pearlstein, Warhol, Cantor: From Carnegie Tech to New York (2016).

In 2016 she sat for Philip Pearlstein, Warhol's college contemporary, over fourteen sittings; Artsy reported that Verin may be the only person portrayed by both artists. She wrote Musing: Sitting for a Portrait by Philip Pearlstein (Betty Cuningham Gallery, 2017), which accompanied Pearlstein's exhibition Facing You.

Personal life

On December 2, 1979, Verin married the artist Rodney Ripps in Chicago; they divorced when their son, the conceptual artist Ryder Ripps, was nine.

Verin relocated from New York to Palm Springs, California, after visiting her son in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic, purchasing a home in Royal Hawaiian Estates, the 1959 Donald Wexler development in Twin Palms built for the architect's mother and her friends, who as Jews had been excluded from other neighborhoods in the area. Her home, where her Warhol and Pearlstein portraits hang together, is profiled in the photography book Inside Palm Springs (Vendome Press, 2025) by Don Flood with text by Peter Haldeman. Of her portraitists she remarked: "Andy made everyone beautiful, and Philip made them ugly."

In 2017 she appeared in The New York Times' Sunday Styles column "Life as a Runway."

Publications

• Beth Levine Shoes. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2009. ISBN 978-1-58479-759-3
• Musing: Sitting for a Portrait by Philip Pearlstein. New York: Betty Cuningham Gallery, 2017.
• Arsho Baghsarian: A Life in Shoes. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Fashion Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-7643-5732-8 {{isbn}}: Check isbn value: checksum (help)

References

Category:American women non-fiction writers Category:Fashion Institute of Technology faculty Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni Category:Artists from Chicago Category:People from Palm Springs, California Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people