Lately, I’ve noticed something exciting: when I see someone, male or female, wearing a really cool pair of oxfords, they’re often made by Cole Haan. It might be a brand that I associate with conservative workplaces and mid-priced shoes for my mom’s demographic, but clearly, things are changing, starting with shoes like the Cole Haan Skyler Lace-Up Oxford. Don’t dig the bright silver? Read More…

Before the return of the classic pump, Manolo Blahnik’s shoes often felt a bit mature for the fashion market. While the ultra-hip among us were teetering around in six-inch platforms, Blahnik, who refuses to entertain such notions, was still selling pumps hand over fist to clients with more traditional taste and waiting for the pendulum to swing back his way. And swing it did. Read More…

Nicholas Kirkwood gets a little crazy from time to time, and we (the Royal “We.” “We” when it really means “I.”) love him for it. Huge fashion houses like Fendi, who had Kirkwood design its Spring 2013 runway shoes, apparently also love him for it. Kirkwood still does what seemingly amounts to a dozen other collaborations a year, many of them with small brands, and his runway shoes for Erdem have always been my favorites. Read More…

I have the feeling that the Pierre Hardy Leather and Suede Wedge Boots are going to be a bit controversial, but I absolutely adore them. They’re sporty, they’re sleek, they’re modern; these boots are like a forward-thinking version of the currently omnipresent sneaker wedges, except they look like they’re designed for someone whose personal style is more sophisticated than trendy. They make a reference to athletic design without putting an actual wedge in an actual sneaker. Read More…

Even though Miu Miu’s Fall 2012 runway shoes have seriously grown on me since debuting on the runway back in February, they’re still the kind of shoes that are going to be a hard sell to a wide retail audience. Miu Miu’s business is predicated on heavy shoe and accessory sale volume (as is nearly every fashion brand’s), so that means adapting a difficult look in a wearable way is essential, even for someone who embraces weirdness as much as Miuccia Prada does. Read More…

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. Read More…

Leave it to Riccardo Tisci to still be looking forward, even when he’s looking back. Many critics credited Givenchy Spring 2013 with being the first of Tisci’s collections in quite a while to noticeably reference the brand’s heritage, but one only needed to move his or her gaze to the models’ feet to know that Tisci’s heart still belongs to what’s to come. Read More…

I’m just putting this out there, but…Celine might be screwing with us. This might be an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, wherein Phoebe Philo is testing just how devoted we are to her whims by proposing the idea of fur-lined (and -covered) Birkenstocks and pumps and seeing just how mindlessly we all flock to them. Based on the number of effusive Instagram pictures I saw from the Celine Spring 2013 show (about the shoes specifically), lots of people are buying in. Read More…