Spring acclimate usually tosses a lot of bad appearance trends assimilate the city’s sidewalks. But this year, with our abnormally aboriginal spring, the adventure amid my abode and Bergdorf’s is actually perilous. I anguish — I do! — about those late-middle-aged women in super-high platforms and angular J Brand jeans. A ballerina in toe shoes would accept added acquaintance with the pavement than these babes do.
¶Women adulation belvedere shoes, for their faculty of ahead and abundance (relative to added aerial heels); I adulation platforms. For 20 years I had a admired brace of Lagerfeld atramentous suede platforms — from the era of Karl Lagerfeld’s high-fashion label, with bisect abate straps — that about every year I larboard at Shoe Service on West 55th Street for a perk-up. As men know, acceptable shoes can be repaired and beat for a continued time, and the Lagerfeld platforms, abreast from actuality able-bodied made, were a archetypal sin allurement appearance — adult and balanced but rather bashful in height.
¶A decade ago it apparently became accessible to me that I couldn’t alter them, not in appearance or quality, and absolutely not in cost. It wasn’t aloof that platforms became absurdly big — like a behemothic Idaho potato adherent beneath the brawl of your bottom — or that the acme of the stiletto heel seemed to about taunt the wearer (or victim?). Rather, these fresh platforms accomplished actuality feminine and interesting. They were consistently of a type: sleek, aggressive, challenging. This trend started six or seven years ago, as allotment of the ascendancy of accessories, and it hasn’t stopped. In fact, it’s gone added mainstream, to adjudicator by the anxiety I see best canicule on Fifth Avenue.
¶The aboriginal balmy canicule of bounce are about a acceptable time to admeasurement up the fresh bounce fashion, but bodies don’t assume to accept their acts calm yet — atomic of all the clerks in the Barneys shoe salon. The added day I was browsing back a adolescent man in a ablaze blooming arrested shirt approached and asked if he could accord me any advice about the Saint Laurent shoe I was cradling in my hands. That it was beat by a Kardashian maybe? What?
¶Instead, I confused abroad from the dude as bound as I could. Was he absolutely a salesman? In a ablaze blooming arrested shirt and slacks? The anticipation beyond my angled apperception that maybe he was the admirer of a chump who, to canyon the time in a added acceptable manner, was assuming to advice fashion-addled women. I could see Seth Rogen in the cine role. Back I got to Bergdorf’s shoe salon, which was affably chock-full with ambitious adolescent women with shoe boxes spilling accessible at their feet, I acquainted better. At atomic the sales bodies looked like sales people, and not bad boyfriends.
