Over the past few seasons, the best of Jimmy Choo’s offerings have often been intricately strappy sandal-booties of various textures and materials. Often, those shoes were also black. If you had shown me a picture of the Dior Temptation Booties without any kind of identifying text to go with it, I would have absolutely assumed that they were a Choo product, and I would have felt confident in my assumption.

It would be inaccurate to refer to Dior as the new guy in shoe town, but this design and the rest of Cruise and Spring 2011 mark a bit of a return to form for Dior as a footwear leader. These shoes don’t reinvent the wheel, of course, but they do what they do very well.

These shoes perhaps don’t have anything new to say, stylistically speaking, but having a workhorse black bootie in your closet is not to be underestimated. The fact that this one straddles the line between bootie and sandal almost perfectly makes it even more versatile and wearable in all but the coldest of conditions, and the large snakeskin panel gives a great touch of texture. With a mid-February delivery date for these shoes, you’ll have them just in time for warmer weather to start peeking through the clouds. Buy through Nordstrom for $990.