With animal print being one of fall’s biggest trends, I think we’ve seen just about every way it can be done, and with every material – leather, nylon, suede, haircalf, sparkles, knits, whatever. The one thing that all of those iterations had in common, of course, is that they were solid – the pattern and its negative space were rendered on the same material.

The Valentino Crystal Zebra Slingback, on the other hand, wants to use your foot as the design’s negative space. I suspect that this shoe might be one of those ideas that sounds brilliant in theory, but doesn’t actually work in practice.

Admittedly, I’d have to see this shoe on someone’s foot to know for sure, but I think that the scale of the zebra pattern might undermine the design’s visual efficacy. The shoe is supposed to make it look like someone painted a sparkly animal print on your foot, but the swaths of black that make up the pattern seem a bit too bulky to have the intended effect in such a small area.

If the designers had chosen to do many small zebra straps with the hidden connector that you can partially see in this shot, the design might have worked in a much more obvious way. As it is, the shoe is still interesting and worth noting, but I don’t think this is the best version of the idea that could have been produced. Buy through Neiman Marcus for $1275.

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