Among the curiosities on the fall 2007 runways: Balenciaga’s Lego/robot shoes, Chloe’s curved cone heels, and Stella McCartney’s tilted platforms that angle the toes towards the sky.
Spring offerings are even more theatrical with Prada heels that look like floral doorstops. Marc Jacobs’ surreal runway styles included some where the models’ heels rested above the shoes.
The current selection at Holt Renfrew Bloor St. bears out the trend, with “hidden” platforms cloaked in green leather and heels that look like shiny black popsicles, or sawed-off coffee table legs.
No wonder the new shoe department at Saks Fifth Avenue’s New York flagship store has its own zip code.
“Footwear seems to be where it’s at when it comes to the forefront of design,” comments Tommy Ton, a photographer who documents street fashion in Toronto and abroad. After the recent spring ’08 collections in Europe and New York, Ton believes that the excitement in fashion has shifted to ground level.
“Footwear has always been an art form but designers are really pushing the envelope and treating it like art,” Ton says. “They’re giving women something more visually stimulating and challenging to sink their teeth and pocketbooks into. Fabrications and ornamentation are becoming more elaborate and eccentric.”
“At the Dior store in Paris, some of the shoes are like works of art,” says Debra Anissimoff, owner of two Zola Shoes stores in Toronto. “They are embellished, and strapped, and so over the top, with heels like a series of red lacquer balls.”
The more cutting-edge styles are presented in a separate gallery-like environment that enhances the wow factor. “Seeing those shoes on the shelves – you could have been looking at a glass vase,” Anissimoff says.
That feetwear is currently at the forefront of fashion design is not news to the regular readers of the Manolo, for it is here, at the humble shoe blog of the Manolo, where shoes have always and forever been celebrated as high art.
That others are just now coming to realize this pleases the Manolo very much.
