Weird heels are everywhere, from loopy rockers to cut-out wedges. But don't try to walk in them!
No one can keep producing the same old thing and call it fashion, so after two summers of the wedge, something was bound to give.
This year, designers have kept their eye on the same triangular slice of space between the inner sole and outer sole - and within its confines let loose their imaginations.
Sometimes the wedge is nothing more than an outline, a gap in the shape of a wedge.
As if to clarify the field of interest, many designers have come up with shoes that looked as if they had lines drawn around their heels. Designer Jil Sander joined the dots between heel, sole and platform, creating a neon shoe on a plinth as if the triangle of consideration had been delineated with a broad orange marker-pen. At Louis Vuitton, a mirrored strip of metal traces instead a cartoonish outline of a heel.
This feels a little like doodling, and you can certainly see the drawing board in all these pieces - but are they meant to be worn? Those Louis Vuitton sandals weigh in at two-thirds of a kilo each and their metal soles do not make the most companionable ally for feet that need to flex. The Paule Ka brogue, which sits on top of a transparent rocker, could fell anyone who enjoys rocking on their heels.
Fashion encyclopaedias would probably index these shoes under "Novelty". But perhaps they are not so new. Jil Sander's plinth shoe looks remarkably like a model sported by well-to-do men in the late 17th century, while wedges with cut-out circles appeared in the US in the 1940s. You can't reinvent the wheel; maybe you can't reinvent the heel either.
Some samplers
*Tango Shoes: Heels that look like question marks and stick like stilettos
*Shanghai wedge heel: The wedge heel with a sloping platform at the front and the diagonal heel at the back...a perfect example of design excess!
The Guardian