Sergio Rossi Creative Director Paul Andrew Handled A Brain Tumor The Only Way He Knew How: By Finding Joy In His Work

In the summer of 2024, the British-born, American-based shoe designer Paul Andrew became the creative director of Sergio Rossi. The Italian shoe label was founded in 1951 by its namesake, and its trademark sculptural sexiness gained even greater prominence with the minimal yet sensual look so prevalent in the ’90s. “I’ve known and loved its aesthetic my whole career,” Andrew says. “[Rossi] was such a genius—he did so much for modern shoemaking, things that people don’t really talk about today: the lightness of the shoe, the inclination of the arch, the padding of the instep, the way the shoe is stitched…. It’s so fine.”

Andrew is, he’ll admit with his wry humor, both a shoe nerd—his personal archive, housed in a vast temperature-controlled storage space in Connecticut, runs to the tens of thousands—and a restless workophile (in addition to Sergio Rossi, he still runs his own namesake line, which he founded in 2012). His peculiarly British twinkling stoicism, meanwhile, makes that drive of his seem like the most charming attribute in the world.

He certainly likes to get things done. His childhood ambition to become an architect was abandoned the minute a friend of his mother’s told him that it can take years to get something built, appalling the teenage Andrew: Why would you bother doing something if you can’t make it as soon as you design it? “Even then,” he says, laughing, “I was impatient.”

GOOD AS GOLD
Andrew’s metallic carbon fiber mules for Sergio Rossi were inspired by Zaha Hadid’s architectural work.

By early December of last year, Andrew was in a groove, traveling back and forth from his new apartment in the Milan neighborhood of Sant’Ambrogio, which he’d barely had time to furnish, to the Rossi factory in the small town of San Mauro Pascoli in the Emilia-Romagna region, renowned for its shoemaking, preparing for his debut collection, featuring everything from gold sandals with straps akin to vertebrae to floor-sweeping fuzzy, furry mules and slouchy, hand-embellished studded boots. “Sergio invented the slouch boot,” Andrew says, “so I wanted to do an ode to that.” (The collection, which was shown—against all odds, and more on this in a bit—in Milan in February 2025, is now available at sergiorossi.com.) Always looking to stretch the vocabulary of shoe design, Andrew was conjuring things like architectural, metallic carbon fiber mules—all Zaha Hadid–esque curves, planes, and lines—and producing them using car-manufacturing techniques. Things were good—in fact, things were great.

Except for the persistent headaches that Andrew had begun to suffer—which started the very first night he moved into his new home. The headaches worsened over the next few days, and then his face began to tingle. Exhausted from the pain and lack of sleep, Andrew went to see a doctor at a nearby hospital, and for three days lay in a corridor of the emergency room waiting for a CT scan. When the results finally came back, Andrew was diagnosed with a trigeminal meningioma tumor in his brain.

One of the first people Andrew broke the news to was Siddhartha Shukla, his former partner of some 20 years. They’re still close, and together they navigated what to do in the hours and days after Andrew’s diagnosis. The plan was to get a noninvasive treatment called Gamma Knife radiosurgery—but, says Andrew, “me being me, I started to research online who was the best at this, and it turned out that NYU Langone developed the technology.” Soon, he was seeing a neurosurgeon there, Chandranath Sen, MD, who let Andrew know that noninvasive treatment not only wouldn’t work for him, but that there was a decent chance it would kill him.