Lucite is such a tempting material for shoe designers. It’s incredibly difficult to create visual lightness while still manufacturing a shoe that will do its functional duties for women of highly varying weights. It’s especially difficult to do translate lightness to the heel of the shoe; either you make it especially spindly and risk breaking all your customers’ ankles, or you go with lucite and try to strip it of the extremely strong association that consumers have between clear heels and strippers. How do you take an inherently cheap-looking material and make it expensive and luxurious?

If you’re a designer looking for tips, just take a look at Valentino Spring 2013. The relentlessly feminine and beautiful look of the shoes makes one forget entirely about the seedy associations most people have with lucite. The wedge heels look like they’re made out of cut crystal, and the regular heels are slim and low enough not to transgress into the clear heels of many a Chris Rock joke. Most importantly, though, the final product fits the Valentino aesthetic perfectly – womanly, utterly luxurious, totally beautiful in the most direct of ways. Check out the full gallery after the jump.

[Images via Vogue.com]