Thursday, January 04, 2007

Happy Shoe Year

The new Bloomies opened up in SF recently and in it I thought I'd found my perfect pair of shoes: black patent leather slingback on a wooden wedge. Lightweight, fun, funky and so cute. Until I saw the price: Six hundred and fifty dollars. Six. Hundred. For shoes. For cute shoes, but still. What the?? Just when I'd been bracing to pay some disgustingly obsence sum for my new "it" bag. Now I have to suck it up for shoes, too?

Fear not, reader, this shopper walked away.

But I was reminded of this shoe incident when reading Alex Kuczynski's "Critical Shopper" column today in the New York Times on a new Spanish shoe store in Soho. She takes a moment to compare the Spanish prices for shoes (reasonable) to current price tags on fashionista must-wears:


To anyone who looks at Vogue or W, it would appear that in order to be fashionable, to be stylish -- to be, in fact, footwear -- shoes must cost $700. There is something dark about this, as if we have become Stepford Wives, marching off to the high-end shoe brands as if our brains has been sucked out of our skulls and replaced with slots for credit cards. Ka-ching.

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