Balenciaga Shoes

We don’t talk about Balenciaga shoes very often around here, but I’d like to change that. Now that Balenciaga’s online store has expanded and the brand has started allowing more major retailers to sell their wares on the Internet, Balenciaga shoes are more visible than ever. For shoe lovers, that’s a great thing – the brand offers a level of highly detailed futurism that’s hard to come by elsewhere.

I’d like to start off with a classic. The Balenciaga Glove Sandal has been around in one form or another for a couple of years now, and its attributes explain perfectly why I have such an affection for the brand. When you combine that with a brilliant red color for spring, I can barely restrain myself.

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After seeing the shoes of Balenciaga Fall 2012, I’m ready to make a somewhat significant declaration: wearability is, without a doubt, the biggest shoe trend of Fall 2012. We’ll pause for a second while your feet, ankles and calves celebrate in relief.

Balenciaga’s shoes, if anything, are known for being back-breakingly tall. The first pair of heels that made my eyes wide with confusion over how anyone ever walked in them was a pair of pink Balenciagas in the pages of Vogue back when I was in college. This collection, though, is full of heels that, while still in the three-to-four inch rage, are considerably shorter than the five- and six-inchers that the brand is known for. Some of the shorter heels are also basically wedges, which means they’re likely the most comfortable runway heels that Balenciaga has shown since the brand put its spin on Doc Martens. Both Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Louboutin have shown relatively wearable heels so far this season, so I’m ready to call it a full-on trend, and a welcome one at that.

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Images via Vogue.com

I’m almost tempted not to write a review about the shoes from Balenciaga Spring 2012 and instead tell you to look at the pictures, because the review should be self-evident. They’re great, in the modern, weird, sculptural way that only Nicolas Ghesquiere can do it.

Not only do the looped leather and architectural heel play a bit with the objective reality of the human foot and the functional necessities of shoe design, but the designs are realized in a lush, luxurious way. Animal prints are painted atop python; colors are carefully coordinated for maximum effect. If you like pieces that are high on concept and low on predictability, this is the collection of the season.

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When I was a young girl only starting to pay attention to my clothing and how I dressed myself, someone told me that I wasn’t allowed to mix primary colors in the same outfit. I don’t know who imparted this rule on me, and to my best recollection, the person didn’t offer any sort of background information on why you shouldn’t mix red, blue and yellow together. And if Vogue photographer Phil Oh’s shot of a pair of amazing Balenciaga sandals outside of the Paris Fashion Week shows is any indication, that rule was entirely wrong then and it still is now. I particularly love the bright shoes against the woman’s black tights.

Photo via Vogue.com.

Count Balenciaga as the latest among the major labels to check their platforms at the door for the season. Although Balenciaga Fall 2011 featured plenty of high heels and the brand’s signature futuristic touches, the base for all of the designs was a pointed-toe, platformless pump. (Ok, so there’s a platform that’s about a quarter of an inch. Compared to recent trends, that constitutes a lack of platform in my mind.) I hope you ladies didn’t get rid of all the heels you had before platforms became the norm, but if you did, Balenciaga would be a great place to start replacing them.

Like the brand’s Fall 2011 bags, the shoes from this collection fell into two categories – buckled pumps in tonal exotics on suede and zip-back ankle booties with parallel straps covering the top of the foot. The former were the sort of lovely, wearable shoe that doesn’t let its sexiness or modernism overtake the design’s mood entirely; the kind of thing that you can wear to work but also out to dinner afterward. Alternatively, the latter group was a slightly more avant garde take on one of footwear’s favorite shapes of the past season, complete with a patterned update for fall.

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If you were among the many people who weren’t impressed by the Doc Martenesque footwear offerings from Balenciaga’s Spring 2011 runway show, fret not; Balenciaga’s Spring 2011 shoes go far beyond that aesthetic and offer plenty of the super sleek heels that the brand is known for, many of them in the season’s oh-so-important colorblocking trend.

Even though I liked the clunky, buckled runway shoes, the heels are clearly the standout pieces of this collection. Most of the wedges and flats are throwaways that appeal to the brand’s loyal fans and the boots have a small, adventurous audience, but I defy anyone to not find a pair of thick-heeled sandals in the collection above that could find a very nice home in your closet.

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If you’re a heel addict, feel free to skip the Balenciaga Spring 2011 shoe collection right now. For the first time in his tenure at the brand, Nicolas Ghesquière showed not a single shoe with a heel, preferring instead to heavily reference the flat, chunky boots of punk rock and street style fame. Seeing a designer unashamedly pull inspiration from the ground up, just as Marc Jacobs did with his iconic grunge collection for Perry Ellis, instead of expecting his ideas filter from the top down was kind of refreshing, as was the wearable nature of the clothes and shoes.

I loved the entire collection, mostly because these are the things I wanted to wear as a Blood Brothers-listening, punk-show-going seventeen-year-old whose mother wouldn’t let her dye her hair black. I now dye my hair every eight weeks like clockwork, and the teenager inside of me wants a pair of the red Doc-esque boots from this collection to wear with anything and everything, but mostly with awesome black minidresses. It looks like punk’s not dead after all, at least not in Paris.

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Is it just me, or are more and more designers adding more and more flats to their lines? The pendulum, of course, is forever swinging back and forth on heel height trends, and after years of towering stilettos (and even more towering platforms), is it possible that things are starting to head back in the opposite direction?

I think that high heels are here to stay, of course, but it’s nice to see influential design houses producing things like the Balenciaga Arena T-Strap Sandal as signature shoes. Not only are the details on this sandal totally special (and very familiar to Balenciaga bag lovers), but they’re on a shoe that you can actually wear more than twice in your life. In fact, you could wear these little darlings all weekend for the entire summer with nary a blister. Brilliant!

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