From Valentino pig hoofs to Chanel half-sandals, our feeds are full of silly, outrageous and outright ugly footwear.<\/p>\n
Girl, have you seen some of the stuff the fashion industry is asking us to put on our feet these days?<\/p>\n
\n Valentino is selling a US$1100 ($1920) pump that leaves two toes
\n exposed, sculpting one\u2019s foot into a cloven pig\u2019s hoof. Hailey Bieber is apparently a fan.\n <\/p>\n
Chanel recently unveiled \u201csandals\u201d that cradle the heel but leave sole, ball and toes fully unsheathed. These are shoes only in the sense that chaps are pants or crotchless panties are shorts.<\/p>\n
Even Tory Burch, a brand usually associated with chic urbanity, is selling a mule that has been pierced at the tip with a thick ring of silver. It\u2019s a bit like seeing your overachieving daughter come home from college with her septum pierced.<\/p>\n
And on social media, people are losing their minds and scratching their heads over more theoretical designs from experimental designers: a shoe with a beam of light for a heel from Monamobile, Kobi Levi\u2019s mind-bending trompe l\u2019oeil high heel that looks like a bifurcated sneaker, and all manner of blocky postindustrial foot riggings from Chant\u00e9 Orrett-Gage\u2019s BA show at London\u2019s prestigious Central Saint Martins school of design.<\/p>\n
Do you love them? Hate them? Either way, you cannot turn away. That\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n
While the luxury fashion market as a whole is contracting, the luxury footwear market is growing. For many fashion brands, attracting shoe shoppers is part of their survival strategy. And capturing a shopper\u2019s attention is a tall order in a crowded and fast-moving social media landscape.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very cynical, I have to say. It\u2019s just that all designers are looking for that moment on Instagram, that viral design,\u201d said Lars Byrresen Petersen, who runs a popular shoe meme account. \u201cAnd I feel terrible saying that because I actually think those shoes are really fun, and I obviously love all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is true: Petersen really loves weird shoes. His Lars LaLa Instagram account has attracted 139,000 followers by spotlighting shoes that resemble condoms, horse legs and \u201cLooney Tunes\u201d characters.<\/p>\n
And he puts his money where his feet are. He wears high heels every day and has recently released his own \u201cheel jewels,\u201d sheaths for stilettos that look like little hydrangeas.<\/p>\n
Today, social media may incentivise novel design. But there\u2019s precedent for eye-catching footwear.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look through history, everything is cyclical,\u201d Petersen said. \u201cAnd if you go back way before the heel even, there were crazy shoes, and they were a tool to differentiate class.\u201d<\/p>\n
Petersen gave two examples: chopines, the towering platform shoes that originated in Europe during the 15th century, worn by women to accentuate the length of their skirts; and poulaines, extremely pointy shoes favoured by the upper classes during the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose were all regulated in length,\u201d said Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. \u201cThe higher you were in society, the longer the pointed toe could be.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cComme des Garcons did a version a few years ago,\u201d she added, referring to a 2015 men\u2019s collection from the avant-garde label.<\/p>\n
Steele sees today\u2019s outre shoe designs as part of a decades-long trend. \u201cSo many kinds of shoes, especially over the last 20 years, have become deliberately strange,\u201d she said. \u201cSince the worst thing in fashion is to be seen as bourgeois and behind the times, you want to be doing something that\u2019s new and different, pushing the envelope.\u201d<\/p>\n
Besides, a woman can remain conventionally beautiful in her hair and makeup while wearing even the most experimental shoes. \u201cThey\u2019re far away from your face, so they\u2019re not making you look ugly,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
A key figure in the Great Weird-ening of shoes is Martin Margiela, the late, enigmatic fashion designer who introduced the split-toe Tabi at his first Maison Margiela runway show in 1988. Margiela was inspired by shoes worn by Japanese workers in the 15th century. Many others, including Kiko Kostadinov, Steve Madden and Nike, have been inspired by Margiela\u2019s Tabi.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a reflexology reason as to why Tabis are so dear to me,\u201d Petersen said. \u201cOnce you separate your big toe from the rest of your toes, you increase your balance, but you also balance your heart chakra.\u201d<\/p>\n
But many cuckoo shoe designs aren\u2019t great for balance, chakra or otherwise. Steele fondly remembers wearing a pair of platforms designed by Noritaka Tatehana, who made a splash decades ago with stacked shoes favoured by fashion plates such as Daphne Guinness and Lady Gaga.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could stand in them for a total of 20 minutes in excruciating pain before I had to take them off and kick on some nice, comfortable five-inch-high heels, where I could actually rest on the heel instead of balancing on the balls of my feet,\u201d Steele said.<\/p>\n
Ah, yes, at the end of a long day, who wouldn\u2019t want to slip into a pair of comfies-cozy five-inch heels?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to look at some of the more extreme designs making waves on social media without wondering if there\u2019s something sadistic or misogynistic at play.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, unless you\u2019re a Japanese female office worker whose office mandates that you have to wear high heels, no woman today has to wear a high heel,\u201d Steele said. \u201cSo it\u2019s clearly a question of women playing the pros and cons of what\u2019s comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Besides, even the most comfortable shoe can be shocking.<\/p>\n
When Steele included a pair of sandals in her first shoe exhibition at the Museum at FIT in 1999, she remembers a horrified reaction from a Brazilian TV journalist.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe rushed over to the Birkenstocks and said, \u2018No Latin woman would wear shoes like that,\u2019\u201d Steele said. \u201c\u2018They\u2019re just so ugly.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
More fashion advice & recommendations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Valentino pig hoofs to Chanel half-sandals, our feeds are full of silly, outrageous and outright ugly footwear.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[192,18526,156,55264,68067,42565,71,2070,246280,246279,111,139,69,42929,226625,62241,62328,68616,23333,73886,95310,4276],"class_list":["post-491287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-are","tag-chanel","tag-entertainment","tag-everywhere","tag-feeds","tag-footwear","tag-from","tag-full","tag-halfsandals","tag-hoofs","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-outrageous","tag-outright","tag-ridiculous","tag-shoes","tag-silly","tag-suddenly","tag-ugly","tag-valentino","tag-why"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}