In the Era of 'It' Shoes, Suffering Is a Given
Lately, the primal urgency to own something simply because it is fabulous seems to exist mostly for shoes. No matter how uncomfortable they are.
“I don’t think we’ve had an ‘It’ bag moment for years,” said Diana Tsui, author of the shopping Substack
and 10 magazine’s contributing digital editor. “I don’t think there’s this mass ‘I need this bag’ feeling. I think the last time we had that was with Phoebe Philo at Celine.”The fashion press has been saying this for years. We seem to hear about the “death of the ‘It’ bag” in times of economic uncertainty. Around the Great Recession, the “It” bag’s demise was more likely to be blamed on “fashion fatigue” — the unappealing ubiquity of certain items — than the idea that rich people felt the need to hide their wealth. In the post-pandemic era of stealth wealth and quiet luxury, we’re experiencing “It” bag death all over again. Late last year, Vogue’s Liana Satenstein wrote a story headlined, “The Power of an Anonymous Anti-It Bag,” arguing in favor of carrying a bag that was hard to identify, unlike, say, Chanel’s 2.55 or Hermès’s Birkin.
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The current stealth wealth trend feels like it’s already had longer legs than the similar phase we saw after the Great Recession. Maybe that’s because it started during the pandemic, the pandemic lasted more than twice as long as the Great Recession, and we keep hearing about an all-new recession that never arrives. However, after the Great Recession, societal attitudes toward the one percent didn’t quite undergo a lasting change. Maybe the current stealth wealth mood is a result of a more permanent shift. And maybe this helps explain why, if we spent much of the first twenty years of this century conferring “It”-ness to bags, now “It” status feels like it’s pretty firmly shifted to shoes, which are often less in-your-face than purses.
If we understand an “It” item to be something that stirs a primal urgency in consumers that inspires them to desperately call boutiques in order to source a certain style that a brand has likely made purposely scarce, many would struggle to come up with a bag that has sparked that in recent years. Lately, that that visceral need to own something simply because it is fabulous seems to exist mostly for shoes — no matter how uncomfortable they are.
Over the summer, we heard ad nauseam about the Alaïa mesh flats. Fashion editors love them! we were told. Before that, it was The Row zippered combat boots. This season, the shoes “everyone wants” are the white Prada kitten heels with the winged toe box adorned with little flowers. Instagram fashion partnerships head Eva Chen unboxed them in the trunk of a car during fashion week. “I haven’t felt strong emotions and wanted to desperately shop in a long time,” she says in her Reel. “I called maybe fourteen stores to try to find these.”
I recently went to an event for Substackers, many of us in fashion, at The Cereal Aisle author
’s apartment. Shoes were removed in the entryway, and multiple pairs of the elusive Prada pumps were bunched near the front door.
Designers seem to know that shoes are the new bag. Burberry’s Daniel Lee told Business of Fashion during fashion week, “The shoes are normally the place we begin each season.” On the runway for Miu Miu — another brand currently experiencing a craze for its kitten heels — models carried overstuffed bags with high pumps spilling out the top. It was clever runway styling, perhaps an imagining of the commute more of us are doing now, but also a smart way to shove multiple “It” shoes in consumers’ faces via one model. Balenciaga showed a clutch bag that is basically a high-heeled pump with a zipper. Tsui, the fashion editor, predicts that Gucci’s platform loafers, shown with super-short, shoe-emphasizing hemlines, will be an “It” shoe when they come out next season.
Sneaker fatigue may also explain a lasting move toward “It” shoes. (I, personally, will remain in sneakers for the foreseeable future.) They’re also much, much less expensive. A small classic Chanel flap bag retails for $9,600. A Birkin 30 costs $11,600. I recently interviewed a former luxury retail worker with experience at Gucci and Nordstrom for a forthcoming “Retail Confessions” column. This person said they had been hearing from their top clients, wealthy people who can afford anything, that they don’t want to shop at Chanel anymore because the prices have gotten out of control. Even if you spring for The Row’s combat boots or Prada’s white floral pumps, at $1,490 a pair, that’s a fraction of the price of many “It” bags currently on the market. The last time “It” bags were peaking, small designer bags could be had for around this price.
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However, unlike bags, wearing “It” shoes requires not just parting with $1,500, but also enduring physical discomfort if not outright pain. “I don’t think comfort matters at all. Let me tell you, I had bloody feet in Paris from those Noir Kei Ninomiya Repettos,” said Tsui, who relied on prophylactic Bandaids. “I just dealt.” She wasn’t able to find a pair of the white Prada floral shoes (yet the nylon bags, she noticed, seemed to be amply stocked), but got another black pair from the collection with a similar winged toe box. “I love them, but my feet were dying,” said Tsui. (I asked another fashion editor who has the white Pradas how comfortable they are; she said they aren’t walking-around shoes and are best for dinner or an event, and that she’s definitely worn worse.)
It’s not like flats are precluded from causing pain. Substacker
recently reported on how The Row’s popular Mary Janes “totally busted” her feet and gave her blisters after walking for 28 minutes.Don’t so many of us have memories of shoes that were so painful, we look back and wonder how on earth we managed to wear them? Don’t so many of us have those very shoes in our closets right now? I do. In the age of the “It“ Shoe, it seems entirely appropriate that one of the most viral photos taken over the course of the this past fashion month was this from the Jason Wu show, by Dina Litovsky, who has been photographing fashion week since 2012.
Litovsky was traveling when I reached out to her for an interview for this story and therefore unable to speak, but she wrote about the photo in her Substack
. She snapped it on assignment for T magazine, which elected to run a different, rosier backstage image. “It was not surprising that a publication dedicated to style wouldn’t want to disturb its reader base or antagonize the fashion industry,” she wrote, adding:I have spent over 12 seasons of Fashion week photographing this shot over and over again, until finally, the yellow satin shoes fitted on battered feet became the final reiteration of a prolonged quest.
Over the years, I have witnessed models with feet that were calloused and covered in band-aids – the bruises resulting from a combination of a grueling schedule and the shoes themselves. Besides the fact that they were often a couple of sizes too small, most of them were uncomfortable to begin with. At a Tommy Hilfiger show in New York, the high-heeled shoes were so ill-fitting that every young woman coming off the runway was gasping in pain.
Litovsky herself has owned heels that she can only wear for a couple of blocks. The high block-heeled pumps poking out of those bags on the Miu Miu runway look to be that sort of shoe. “In my version of female utopia, the fashion industry would respect women’s comfort, and looking beautiful wouldn’t have to be a painful ordeal. The fact that the image resonated with so many women gives me a tiny hope that change is already in the air,” she wrote.
While I agree wholeheartedly with her, it also seems likely that horribly uncomfortable, highly desirable shoes will just be exploited by the fashion industry to increase our shoe purchases. Here are the heels you’ll wear when you get there, and, Here are the flats you’ll wear on the way. Maybe after being in sneakers for so long, and after being sequestered for so long during the pandemic, brands figure that our feet have rested long enough.
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Oh my God, total side note, but that photo of the shoes in the entryway...totally reminds me of that episode of Sex and the City where someone steals Carrie's Manolos and she has to force Tatum O'Neal to replace them for her.
(Great piece, as usual, Amy.)
It's really quite ridiculous. Shoes as art, instead of shoes as apparel. The former is some artistic director with a conceptual drawing, whilst the latter is a shoe manufacturer making things people can actually wear. Don't get me wrong, I love shoes. But, shoes need to fit feet, our feet shouldn't have to fit the shoes.