Manolo says, here is the Manolo’s latest column for the Express of the Washington Post.

Dear Manolo,

Two years after a fairly painful divorce, I’ve decided that it’s time to get back out there and try again. In other words, I’m going out on a date with a gentleman I met online. (We’ve already met for coffee during the daylight hours, so the preliminaries are out of the way.) What I need for this date, however, is a good looking, feminine shoe with a bit of a heel, something that is not too overtly sexy. Please help.

Kristin

Manolo says, such are the mores and customs of the modern world! Once we relied upon the nosey neighborhood busybodies in colorful headscarves to find us our suitable mates.

“Ethel, I have found the perfect gentleman for your daughter,” said Mrs. Grabblefarb the Matchmaker, the stout woman who favored bright colors, and whom your mother most often encountered at the fishmonger’s shop.

“Oh, I do hope he’s better than the last one, Esther,” answered Mama, making reference to the recent attempt to pair you with the 54-year-old, never-married streetcar conductor.

“This one? He’s a podiatrist, and a widower. Such a catch,” she answered, fingering the large carp whose price had been greatly reduced.

Now, of the course, we rely upon computers to bring us outdated pictures of unknown peoples, safe in the knowledge that such advanced technology is clearly superior to the old ways.

Look! Here is the aptly named Secret Love from Nanette Lapore. Feminine and attractive without being crass.

Manolo says, these beautiful Giuseppe Zanotti sandals with the beautiful, tiny-little flowers is not only most beautiful and cheerful, but it is also on the sale, more than 50% off of the regular price.

Manolo says, it is Monday and you are back at your desk, although frankly, as is usually the case, you would prefer to be somewhere else, maybe on the beach with the piña colada, or the dark side of the moon with only your clone for company, anywhere away from the incessant petty demands of the commercial workplace.

Everyone knows that summers are the worst time to have to go to the work. From childhood, you have been conditioned to take the three months from June to August off, spending those days in simple, wholesome pleasures: riding your bike to the swimming hole, catching fireflies in the gloaming, eating the watermelon slices and spitting the seeds at your little sister.

But then, when you became the adult, everyone expects you to change the natural order of things. Thereafter you must spend your summer days locked up in the cubicle, drenched in flickering, artificial light, constantly at the mercy of the bad-tempered bullies who sign your paychecks.

And now, in place of the lazy warm days spent lying on the lawn and staring at the clouds, you exchange your freedom for money, and attempt to cram your summer into the two weeks of vacation the bullies have allotted to you.

It is days like this that your most agrarian fantasies take flight. It is on these summer days, as you drive down the freeway, your business clothes cutting off the circulation to your buttocks, that you vow to quit the job, sell the house and the car, and buy the farm in the foothills of the Catskills…no, the Appalachians…wait, on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Virginia! Yes, in Virginia.

And there, on your 19th century homestead, (which still has the bullets holes from the minor Civil War skirmish), you will raise goats (chèvre!) and chickens (free range eggs!) and plant the enormous truck garden. And on Saturdays, you will load up your antique Ford pick-up truck and drive to the farmer’s market. There, your heirloom beefsteak tomatoes will command the premium price, because famous television chefs had praised your vegetables in glossy magazines with obscenely luscious photographs.

But then you break your nail while applying the thick coating of suntan lotion to your arms, so as to protect your delicate cuticle as you dash from the office to your car in the midday sun, making you think that maybe, perhaps, you are not so well suited for the farm life.

You know what it is you now require? Shoes! Beautiful, sweet shoes.

These beautiful shoes, the Lana Patent Leather Peep-Toe Pumps by Brian Atwood may well be the cure for what ails you.

Manolo says, here is the Manolo’s latest column for the Express of the Washington Post.

Dear Manolo,

Starting next week, my sister, her husband, and two grade-school sons are coming from California for a five-day, Fourth of July visit. They’re going to be doing all of the sights, from the White House to the Smithsonian, and back again. I’ve decided to take two days off work and go with them on a couple of these jaunts, so there will be lots of walking in the unrelenting District of Columbia heat. Can you suggest some very comfortable sandals that don’t look a fright?

Ellen

Manolo says, in the Manolo’s opinion, the Fourth of July is the best time of the year in the Washington, D.C., for the simple reason that no one looks at you askance for being the super patriotic flag-waver who expresses the ardent love of country. You are free to enjoy the fireworks and the brass bands, the happy crowds and the monuments, as if you were the little kid who has just memorized the preamble to the Constitution. (To have the company of actual children will make these simple pleasures doubly sweet.)

Unfortunately, at this time of the year, the Washington weather is not the most salubrious, for indeed, such heat and humidity are rarely found outside of the Turkish sauna. On the other of the hands, the congress persons have departed the district, leaving only the mosquitoes to feast upon your very essence.

Look! Here is the Julia from Think! It is comfortable and not unstylish.

Manolo says, the Manolo’s friends at the Collector’s Weekly (which earlier this year published the remarkable interview with the shoe collector John Walford) have returned with the excellent interview with Elizabeth Semmelhack, one of the curators at the magnificent Bata Shoe Museum and author of the book Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe.

There is much in this interview to both ponder and enjoy, but below are two intriguing excerpts.

Collectors Weekly: How did a pair of Manolos or Louboutins become star accessories?

Semmelhack: I don’t think that it was the designers themselves who did it as much as the culture. Clearly their shoes are lovely, but over the course of the 20th century, you have a great loss of accessories in women’s wear. I like to use the hat as an example of that. If you think about watching “I Love Lucy” on TV, so often she’s walking by a hat shop and she stops to purchase a hat. Now she’s got to hide it from Ricky because God forbid he sees it. It’s the hat that she must have, the hat, the hat, the hat. Along the same lines, we had white gloves and we had pearls and we had other similar ways of expressing status.

With the loss of iconic accessories like those, shoes carry a greater burden of meaning. We now require shoes to really, as someone said, punctuate our fashionable outfit or unfashionable outfit, whatever we’re doing. They are increasingly a way of turning a generic outfit around, and I think that’s one of the reasons why shoes have become such a focal point of culture. We can read a lot into them.

But today, where fashion has been so democratized, you can have two women of wildly different socioeconomic standings or wildly different social constructs of themselves going into the same, say, Gap store and buying the exact same pair of jeans. One might wear her jeans with a pair of Manolo Blahniks, making one statement, while the other woman puts on a pair of Keds to go watch her kids play soccer, and she makes a different statement.

The loss of the hat as the fashion accessory elevates the shoes to the place of prominence? The theory is so simple and elegant, it cannot but be true.

Here is the second excerpt, this time on the topic of clothing for the men.
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Manolo says, here is the Lulu from Botkier, the flat sandal that embodies two of the lesser trends of the season, both of which the Manolo approves: the easy entry zipper in the back, to help us deal with the recent spate of complex, torus-and-klein-bottle shoes, and the airy mesh panel, which is perhaps the first reasonable step away from the complex, torus-and-klein-bottle shoes.

Manolo says, here are the few links which may perhaps amuse…

I think objects become more touching as we grow older. Often what goes out of fashion has a deeper meaning because it has a personal attachment. The ugly can seem beautiful.

Oh, the unbearable cuteness of being! As if Vivienne Westwood and Melissa Plastic Dreams’ shoe mashup wasn’t squee-worthy enough, now they’ve done gone and had babies.

It’s not easy being a woman nowadays.

Manolo says, it is summer and the Manolo has returned to Malibu for the season. This year, he was disappointed to learn that the Sigerson Morrison store the Manolo liked to stroll past on his way to Nobu has closed it’s doors, thus sending several tall, thin, tanned, would be models/aspiring actresses/future second wives, out into the unemployment line.

The Manolo is disappointed because he considers Sigerson Morrison to be the sort the public fashion utility, not excessively flashy, but always reliably stylish. They can be depended upon to look good when you need them.

Happily, although the Manolo’s favorite retail location has gone away, Sigerson Morrison shoes persist, and even the better, they are now on the sale!

Look here are several Sigerson Morrison shoes which are selling at more than 50% off of the usual price.

These high-heeled sandals with the clever, strappy details can be yours at the price that is reduced $525 dollars below the normal retail cost.

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Manolo says, it is Monday, and you are back at your desk grumbling about the various and sundry injustices of the workplace.

Naturally, when you get to feeling so put upon and grumbly, you turn to the interwebs to provide you with the five or six minutes of mindless entertainment, and what (other than the lolcats) could be more amusing than pictures of beautiful shoes, as delivered by the strange person with the odd way of writing?

And so, while doing the little bit of virtual windowshopping at your favorite shoe blog you come across these Jimmy Choo Mercury Mix sandals the name of which makes you laugh out loud…

They make you laugh out loud because you are your father’s daughter, and so you well remember this person…

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Manolo says, here is the Manolo’s latest column for the Express of the Washington Post.

Dear Manolo,

Because I’m the new girl in the office, I’m not going to get take my vacation until the very end of August. In the meantime, I’ve got to stick it out at work, here in the city, in this sweltering heat. At least my boss is cool with open-toed shoes and sandals, which means I can find some relief for my poor, swollen, sweaty feet. Please suggest something that will make me feel better about my predicament.

Kate

Manolo says, it is summer time! Time for sun in your fun!

Or, in the case of the Manolo’s friend, time to sit in the office and dream of being somewhere other than at the desk.

But, such is the nature of life. While some peoples are off riding the gold-plated jet-skis with Fabio on Lake Como, others must tend to the machineries of commerce, adding their imperceptible widow’s mite to the Product of Gross Domestication.

Later, when it is finally your turn to take the vacation, you will spend most of it helping your divorced mother clean out her garage, so that there will be room for her new boyfriend to park his bass boat.

Then, after your familial duties are completed, you will have three days all to yourself, which you will spend at the unseasonably rainy Maryland shore, eating room service crab cakes and watching daytime television.

Look espadrilles! From Delman!

Manolo says, like the shoe-shaped Bat Signal, the plaintive cry went out from deep within the blogosphere, “Manolo, please explain to us this picture of Sarah Jessica Parker, as it has vexed us mightily.”

Although the Manolo’s good friend Linda Grant would likely refer to this picture as “mutton dressed as lamb,” the Manolo would prefer to call it “The Rose in Autumn…Late Autumn.”

On the one of the hands, Sarah Jessica Parker looks as good as she possibly can: fit, happy, perhaps the too much eye makeup, and the too little powder, but otherwise vibrantly alive and shining with mature femininity.

On the other of the hands, this Vivienne Westwood dress is the decade too young for her. It is the lighthearted Englishy pattern with the handkerchief hem, more suitable for the milkmaid on the springtime bender in the city, than the worldly sophisticate at the movie premiere.

Perhaps it is meant to be in character for the fictional Carrie Bradshaw, who is the definition of over-the-top-ness, although, sadly, this dress does little good for the real Sarah Jessica Parker. (It should be noted that the whole point of Vivienne Westwood is over-the-top-ness, and to chose her is to go down the bright and flowery, gold-belted, spangly path to perdition.)

The second, and more perplexing matter, is the Charlotte Olypmia platform pumps, of which the Manolo’s friends have inquired “How? Why?”

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Manolo says, here to start your summer’s day with the pleasant surprise is the pair of perfectly summertastic, pink Alexander McQueen sandals, selling for more than 50% off of the regular price, the savings of nearly $370 of the American dollars.