Marni Shoes

If you’ve noticed, we’ve had a running theme on TalkShoes over the past couple of days: Versace and what is simultaneously so wrong and so right about its shoes. The brand’s love for lucite in particular tends to be a sticking point for some people, but really, there’s nothing inherently tacky about the material. In fact, I think it gets an entirely undeserved bad reputation when it comes to lucite as a shoe design element. After all, any material can look different when used by a skilled designer.

Don’t believe me? Take a gander at the Marni Leather and Wood Sandals. In between all the classic Marni-ness of this shoe lies a thin layer of thoroughly modern lucite, and to me, that little detail makes all the difference.

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Marni Embellished Suede Platforms, $1160 via Net-a-Porter

I remember my first pair of high heels very clearly. I was 12 years old, and my mother reluctantly bought them for me to go with the black dress I had picked out to wear to a friend’s bat mitzvah. They were Nine West, and the tall, chunky heel seemed like the most sophisticated thing in the world to me. They were black, and the little platform in the front made me feel extra tall.

Thirteen years later, the bat mitzvah friend is now my roommate almost a thousand miles from home in New York City, and the Marni Embellished Suede Platforms remind me a lot of the shoes I wore to her entré to adulthood more than a decade ago. Maybe I should have saved them.

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If all of the posts I’ve written so far haven’t convinced you that chunky heels are the single biggest shoes trend for fall, perhaps these photos of Marni Fall 2011 will be the thing that does it. There’s not a stiletto to be found in this quirky collection of bi- and tri-colored shoes; instead, we have leather wedges and and neo-clog mary janes in the kinds of muted colors that will go perfectly with fall knits.

But lets go back a little bit to the part about mary janes – pumps with straps seem to be Fall 2011′s second biggest footwear trend, and you’ll find plenty of them among the options in Marni’s collection. Unlike brands more known for their sexy footwear, it somehow feels right for Marni to make a mary jane. Retro-modern girlishness is something that the company does flawlessly from season to season, and the mary jane fits in easily with that look, particularly when sitting atop a thick midcentury heel.

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