I’m sure that all of you heard about the passing of Hollywood legend and all-around awesome lady Elizabeth Taylor yesterday, and looking at the many retrospectives on her life that popped up in the wake got me thinking about what Taylor wore not as herself, but as her characters. She played everyone from a mean-spirited, middle-aged professor’s wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to the queen herself in Cleopatra, and the wardrobes that she inhabited during her career span an aesthetic continuum that few other actors can claim.

Taylor’s best known for her work in the late 1950s and 1960s, though, which is precisely the era to which the Tabitha Simmons Two-Tone Leather Pumps harken back. It was a time of sharply-tailored formality and shoes that a woman could actually walk in, but that didn’t stop Taylor from becoming one of the world’s best-known beauties or finding ways to sartorially stop traffic. During that time, these shoes would have been just the thing.

From the side, these shoes look far more 60s than they do from the back. The chunky heel actually narrows out quite a bit at the bottom to reduce the shoe’s visual heft, a move of which I’m sure any number of old-school screen sirens would have approved. The two-tone tan leather and touch of wingtipping give the design a thoroughly retro feel, and it’s almost so retro that I wonder if the shoe’s audience will be limited. I hope not, because these shoes constitute a very nice, subtle update on a classic footwear look. Buy through Net-a-Porter for $1010.