Tabitha Simmons Shoes

With so many shoes on the luxury mass market and new designers popping up all over the place, doing a wearable and neutral design in an interesting way is an ever-present challenge for people and brands who want to set themselves apart. Not only is that the kind of shoe that can persuade a customer to make her first purchase with your company, but it’s the kind that will give her positive thoughts about your brand every time she dons the pair. If that’s not a recipe for brand success, I don’t know what is.

The Tabitha Simmons Cutout Lizard Ankle Wrap Sandals are just that kind of shoe. The texture and color variations in the lizard skin provide plenty of visual fun, but at they’re hard, they’re a brown and cream sandal that could go with a lot of the things you have in your wardrobe.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

It takes more than a little nerve for a designer to use a lot of print in a shoe or accessory collection. Most customers tend to look for versatility in shoes, and making a collection with print of one sort or another on nearly ever shoe takes a designer who has the courage of his or her convictions. Luckily for all of us, Tabitha Simmons Spring 2011 is a collection that’s not afraid to play with our expectations.

Whether she achieves the effect through patterned fabric or the combining of different leathers, Simmons brings a great deal of visual interest to each of her hand-made shoes. For a line that has only existed since 2009, it sure seems to know where it’s going.

Continue reading →