Manolo says, behold! Beautiful and unusual platform sandals from Burberry in the handsome dark nickel color, but that name? What does it mean? Tonal…Check…Perspex?
It sounds less like something you would wear on your feets and more like the DARPA super secret squirrel project.
Manolo says, here is the Manolo’s latest column for the Express of the Washington Post.
Dear Manolo,
I need some shoes for my big Valentine’s Day night out with my beau. The problem is that I’m a poor college girl and don’t have money to buy the sort of shoes I’d really like to own. Please help.
Nicole
Manolo says, frankly, the Manolo is surprised to learn that the college girls still have the boyfriends who are willing to escort them out for the Dia de San Valentino’s night on the town.
Recently, while travelling, the Manolo dined at the moderately expensive restaurant in the large Midwestern college town. While there, he could not help but notice that nearly all of the other tables were occupied by groups of well-dressed college girls, with nary the man to be seen. Meanwhile, outside the windows of the restaurant, the endless parade of college boys schlumped by in their blue jeans and novelty t-shirts, baseball caps jammed backwards onto their heads.
The Manolo’s dining companions assured him that this was the new paradigm, that young people no longer date in the old manner. In the stead, the girls get dressed up, and the boys do not, then they go out for the night in their gendered packs. Sometime later in the evening, fueled by cheap beer and flaming Jagermeister shots, the various groups collide to the pulsatingly inane rhythms of Lady Gaga.
So, congratulations to the Manolo’s friend on maintaining the more pleasant and enjoyable romantic tradition.
Look! Here is the Prive from Calvin Klein, the elegant, black suede, platform sandal that will look appropriately sophisticated at the reasonable price.
Manolo says, it is Tuesday and you are back at your desk doing whatever it is you normally do, but very badly, as you are completely distracted by Thanksgiving, which is now barreling down upon you like the runaway freight train full of free-range turkeys.
Thanksgiving was not supposed to be crazy this year. It was going to be just you and Gary and the kids and your mother. But then your mother called two weeks ago, and said she’d invited your Uncle Bill to fly out from Buffalo for Thanksgiving.
“Okay,” you thought, “one more won’t hurt. Uncle Bill is an old school nut who will probably goad Gary into an argument about professional football. But one more won’t hurt.”
And then your mother informed you that Uncle Bill insisted on inviting his son, your layabout cousin Billy, to fly in from Hollywood to join you. Billy calls himself the “writer-director-actor-producer,” although what he really is is the 43-year-old, cut-rate playboy who subsists on the variety of menial jobs and handouts from your uncle. Although, to his credit, he did once appear as the non-speaking extra on Will and Grace, in the distant background, as the coffee shop patron.
Speaking of people subsisting on handouts, two days after your mother’s call, your daughter Jeannie, who is away at the college, called to say that she has invited some dorm friends home for Thanksgiving — three foreign girls and one Latvian boy — who have nowhere to go for the holiday.
“The more the merrier,” you think. And then the conversation takes the surreal turn.
“Mom,” says Jeannie, “one of the girls is from Africa, and in her culture the turkey is considered sacred.”
“What?”
“We can’t have turkey, because Ki’x'il’ko,” the name included three clicks and the pop, “says her people consider the turkey to be a type of sacred spirit.”
Later, when you tell Gary that you’re going to have to order goose for Thanksgiving, his reply is succinct.
“Bull-crap. The turkey is sacred to my people, too, especially when served with sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.”
“But we can’t be offending this girl.”
“Tell her it’s a really big chicken. Nobody thinks chickens are holy.”
And then five minutes after you get off the phone with the butcher, who informs you that you cannot order the 23-pound goose, so you’ll need three smaller birds, Jeannie calls back.
“Mom,” she says, “Ki’x'il’ko says it’s okay to have a turkey. She looked up the word. It’s ostrich that’s supposed to be sacred to her people.”
Luckily, you were able to call the butcher back and cancel the flock of geese.
And now, on Tuesday, with two days to go, you are frazzled and distracted from your work. And yet you are also filled with pride that everyone would consider your home and your family as being the good place to celebrate this important holiday.
Look, here is the Christian Louboutin Feticha Botta Platform Boots, simple, beautiful, dead sexy.
Manolo says, the Manolo is feelings slightly down in the dumps this afternoon. And so, what better way to cheery oneself up then with the beautiful pair of the bright red shoes?
Here is the gorgeous patent leather peep-toe pump from Valentino, exactly the sort of shoe that would convert any day into the living-on-sunshine festival of good humor.
Manolo says, here is the Manolo’s latest column for the Express of the Washington Post.
Dear Manolo,
After meeting my parents for the first time, my boyfriend of nearly four months decided to break it off with me. I think I’ve finally convinced myself that he was a jerk, but I still need consoling . Can you recommend some shoes that will ease my pain?
Roseanne
Manolo says, it is clear that the Manolo’s friend understands one of the undeniable truths of life, that shoes are among the most powerful anelgesics known to womankind. Indeed, few things can alleviate romantic heartache and depression as quickly as shopping for the new pair of shoes.Strangely, the curative power of shoe shopping is little recognized by modern science.
Today, more often then not, if one goes to the psychiatrist to complain about the broken heart, one comes away with the fistful of antidepressants and the head filled with Dr. Freud’s banalities, when what is really needed is the following: one’s best friends, the quart of high-end Rocky Road, and Saks Fifth Ave’s shoe department. Repeat treatment as indicated.
Shoe shopping with your best girlfriends is like the chicken soup for the broken hearted; the common sense cure that mothers know but doctors have ridiculed.
And really, which would you rather spend $250 on? One hour talking to someone who is probably much, much crazier than you are, or these wonderfully fun cork platform wedges, the Kipper from Juicy Couture. Unlike you basic tweedy shrink, these come in six super fantastic colors!
Manolo says, this is the sort of atrocity that makes the Manolo waver between anger and despair, while the price leaves him gasping.
P.S. Many thanks to the Manolo’s shoe-obsessed friend Wayne.
Manolo says, maybe, possibly, if you were nine years old and playing the role of Belle in the production of “Beauty and the Beast.”
And yet, even as the Manolo mocks, he cannot deny that the shoe is made with beautiful materials, and is impeccably finished, even if it excessively childish.
Manolo says, here it is the first Monday in March and Old Man Winter is still battering away at your resolve and sanity.
“Any day, now,” you keep saying to yourself, “the sun will break through, the snow will melt, and Spring will be here.”
But then you get up in the morning, and leave the house, only to be assaulted by freezing rain, or hail, or snow, or some deadly combination of freakish weather that leaves you cursing the weatherman and his ignorant ilk.
Oh for the simpler days, when all that was necessary to make the sun shine was to throw the few sacrificial captives into the gaping maw of the bottomless limestone hole that led to the subterranean realm of Gaa’agkai, the God of Inclement Weather.
“First to the edge of the sacrifical hole,” you shout at the heavens, the stinging rain whipping across your face, “Al Roker!”
Oh well, at least when you get to the office you can look at the beautiful vernal shoes, like these Camoscio Deco Suede Platform Sandal from Prada. It even has the spring flower on the insole!
Manolo says, the Manolo does not approve.
The 5 1/2in creations by Briton Antonio Berardi can hardly be described as high heels, since they lack the most important part – a heel.
For the bargain price of £1,800, the wearer will get to totter around with all her weight balanced on a thickened platform sole.
Unsurprisingly, fashionistas are jostling to buy a pair.
Stars including Gwyneth Paltrow and Uma Thurman invested in a black patent version costing more than £1,100, shortly after they were unveiled in Berardi’s spring/summer collection in Paris.
And Victoria Beckham apparently has a snakeskin pair.
They are going on sale in Browns stores in London, where they have to be ordered up to five weeks in advance.
Lincolnshire-born Berardi, 39, said he was inspired by Latin American music and 1980s post-modernism, adding: “When you walk, it is almost on tiptoe. You look really dainty.”
Dainty, as if your feet were bound in infancy by Mandarins.
