Shoesday Quandary: If These Are What’s Here, What’s Next?
What Phoebe Philo throws will stick. This is a truth that demands, for better or worse, acknowledgement. The Birkenstock renaissance of 2012-and-beyond is a proof of this concept, even if it is just that — a rebirth.
Furthermore, that the conversation has proliferated far enough to maintain relevance in 2015, when several iterations of the shoe-that-spawned-normcore is still being produced to the satisfaction of intelligent consumers, is a coup in itself.
And while Céline’s spring offering still proposes a quite literally “elevated” version of the anterior comfort shoe, the upcoming season also points toward a differing interest from within the cabinet of Philo’s curiosities, where three iterations of an elastic ballet shoe — one with a short heel, another flat, and one style with a brushed metal charm on the toe — are on the brink of rulership. These seem to prove that Philo is not at all concerned with reinventing the wheel.
Elastic ballet slippers have been resting largely dormant on unassuming sales floors at sensible shopping depots for at least the better part of the last decade. More recently, such indie brands as Maryam Nassir Zadeh and better known ones like Isabel Marant have provided at least an iota of cool-factor for the shoe.
But prior to that, much like the Birkenstock, the elastic ballet shoe was a flight of rather simple convenience and comfort.
I guess Philo has never been about reinventing the wheel. She’s proven herself a stalwart leader in the art of re-appropriation and presentation with her crisp white, collarless shirts and the menswear inclination she demonstrates in producing a pair of clean pants. What she does is make sure, through a much lauded virtue — patience — that her wheel is the shiniest. (Or is it the furriest?) The most digestible and desirable. She capitalizes on the self-consciousness of trend-driven shoppers who are too afraid to admit aesthetic ache and solves their problems before they can be addressed.
This shoe could very well be one more nod to just that but it’s worth wondering: if the last time she set in motion such a profound ripple effect that it took us not just back to Woodstock but the entire era that occurred around it, what happens this season, when we’re all abandoning concrete shoe borders for the malleable kind?
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