Look! Beautiful shoes from Christian Louboutin.
Look! Beautiful shoes from Christian Louboutin.Pique Prive Patent Pumps from Christian Louboutin for the MondayManolo says, it is Monday and you are back at your desk doing that thing that you do for that money that you need.
Normally, this would be the cause of mild discomfort and soul-weariness, as who would not prefer to be away from grindstone?
However, given how roastingly hot it is out of the doors, you do not mind being in the air conditioning during these most Doggish Days of Summer. And, even the better, your boss, along with two or three of the office troublemakers, are away on their vacations, allowing all of the remaining worker mice to play, or at the least to somewhat chillax.
And so, you will spend much of the morning locked in conversation with your cubemate/frenemy Dina, whom you like/dislike in that way peculiarly reserved for the co-workers.
“Did you see what Snooki was wearing yesterday,” begins Dina’s conversational gambit. (She is obsessed with the reality shows.)
“I don’t watch that,” you lie, trying to maintain your image of aloof intellectualism.
“Oh, don’t fib. I saw you friending the Situation last week.”
“It was not the Situation,” you fib, “it was Jonathan Safran Foer.”
“Honey, Jonathan Safran Foer’s pectoral muscles do not look like that.”
And so it goes, exhaustingly inconsequential tittle-tattle conversations about minor celebrities and their doings. It is almost enough to make you wish for the untimely return of your boss-lady…almost.
Look! Beautiful shoes from Christian Louboutin.
The Pique Prive Patent Leather Pumps from Christian Louboutin are more than enough to remind you that, in general, life can be pretty good.
Interview With the CuratorManolo says, the Manolo’s friends at the Collector’s Weekly (which earlier this year published the remarkable interview with the shoe collector John Walford) have returned with the excellent interview with Elizabeth Semmelhack, one of the curators at the magnificent Bata Shoe Museum and author of the book Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe.
There is much in this interview to both ponder and enjoy, but below are two intriguing excerpts.
Collectors Weekly: How did a pair of Manolos or Louboutins become star accessories?
Semmelhack: I don’t think that it was the designers themselves who did it as much as the culture. Clearly their shoes are lovely, but over the course of the 20th century, you have a great loss of accessories in women’s wear. I like to use the hat as an example of that. If you think about watching “I Love Lucy” on TV, so often she’s walking by a hat shop and she stops to purchase a hat. Now she’s got to hide it from Ricky because God forbid he sees it. It’s the hat that she must have, the hat, the hat, the hat. Along the same lines, we had white gloves and we had pearls and we had other similar ways of expressing status.
With the loss of iconic accessories like those, shoes carry a greater burden of meaning. We now require shoes to really, as someone said, punctuate our fashionable outfit or unfashionable outfit, whatever we’re doing. They are increasingly a way of turning a generic outfit around, and I think that’s one of the reasons why shoes have become such a focal point of culture. We can read a lot into them.
But today, where fashion has been so democratized, you can have two women of wildly different socioeconomic standings or wildly different social constructs of themselves going into the same, say, Gap store and buying the exact same pair of jeans. One might wear her jeans with a pair of Manolo Blahniks, making one statement, while the other woman puts on a pair of Keds to go watch her kids play soccer, and she makes a different statement.
The loss of the hat as the fashion accessory elevates the shoes to the place of prominence? The theory is so simple and elegant, it cannot but be true.
Christian Louboutin Fernando Sandals For the Tuesday
Manolo says, it is Tuesday, and you are back at your desk, the glorious summer of 2010 proceeding without you. But, not to worry, you have had the sufficient dosage of summer over this past holiday weekend to hold you for many days to come.
It was not the undercooked hot dogs, nor the overripe potato salad, but the near drowning incident that perhaps has soured you on the entire Fun In The Sun™ enterprise.
But the less said of that, the better.
All you choose to remember is the image of your husband pulling your teenaged son back into the boat by the hair, slapping him on the back as he coughed up water, and saying, “that was fun, wasn’t it?”
And your son, your lovely, sweet boy, not only agreed to this maniacal proposition of fun-ness (fun-hood, fun-osity?) , not only agreed, but wanted to get back on the inner-tube as soon as possible.
“This time,” he said, spitting up the algae, “I think I can get more air if you go a little faster, Dad.”
Aaaarrrrrregggggghh!
And then you remember, it is after the Day of Memorialization, you can wear the white shoes!
I know Easter was like, over a month ago, but hear me out! Basket-inspired shoes are totally fashion-forward for the summer months ahead! A looser basket weave boasts chic cut-outs for maximum breathability for the hot weather to come, like these super-high wedges by Sam Edelman, while tighter-woven patterns like in these Cole Haan metallic pumps provide more texture than your typical solid heels. Woven shoes, whether in the form of casual flat sandals or a summer take on edgy peeptoe booties, seem to have a sort of automatic earthy vibe and give an extra dose of effortlessness to a meticulously-planned outfit. There’s a laidback, sort of “homemade” feel about them, in a cool way that you’d never be able to pull off if you actually tried to weave your own sandals! For further inspiration on how to get your weave on this summer, scope out my slideshow for my 10 favorite woven flats, sandals, and booties!