SS12 Fashion Week Footwear: OMG YSL

Shoe lovers, we’ve been together long enough that I feel I can confide my deepest-felt emotions to you, and it’s with that security and knowledge that I make this confession.

I am in love.

I am in love with a platform.

I am in love with a beautifully fastened slingback.

I am in love with an etched instep shield.

I am in love with texture combinations that are simultaneously creative and restrained.

I am in love with the continuation of the SS12 trend for shiny shiny metallic gold.

I am in love with footwear that requires a polishing cloth.

I am in love with heels that are actually a wearable height.

I am in love with a neutral color palette highlighted by jewel tones in suede.

I am in love with reflective surfaces in unexpected places.

I am in love with shoes that can somehow be business-like and sexy as all get out.

I am in love with the kind of glitz that belongs on Audrey Hepburn’s stylish feet.

I am in love with dainty, on-trend ankle straps.

I am in love with toes that are just the right rounded square shape.

I am in love with shoes that are classic enough to last season after season.

I am in love with a sprinkling of sparkly crystals.

I am in love with the way the light shines off all those matte and semi-lustrous surfaces.

I am in love with shoes that seem to be from a whole bunch of 20th century decades all at once.

I am in love with elegant hardware details.

I am in love with a play of hard and soft.

Yes, Shoeblog fans, it’s true.  I am in love with Stefano Pilati’s Spring/Summer 2012 shoe collection for Yves Saint Laurent.

SS12 Fashion Week Footwear: Vive la France!

I always love that Paris Fashion Week comes last, because its style is my overall favorite.  I’m always likely to covet more shoes from the Paris runways than New York, London, or Milan.  This year is no exception.  I’m loving what we’ve seen from Gay Paree.

Balmain showed us glamorously embellished boots with heels and patent leathers and filigree swirls that make me swoon.

Viktor & Rolf gave us typically playful and over-the-top mules and sandals that made good use of the SS12 transparency trend.

Sonia Rykiel offered up charmingly wearable simple silhouettes with fun lacing details (and by the way, I’m proud of how closely those last flat ones match the “Pocahontas” Louboutins I scored some years back).

On that note, Jean-Paul Gaultier showed a similar silhouette with this sporty white number.

I give that one a big and central visual shout-out, because much as I like to ogle the awesome heels shown on the runways, I do so love seeing shoes that actually look like I could wear them in style and comfort on a daily basis.

However, I refuse to ignore the gorgeousness (and simultaneous unwearable-unless-one-is-Lady-Gaga-or-Victoria-Beckham-ness) of the rest of the JPG footwear.  Behold the pretty!

But wait! Despite the indisputable beauty (go on, I dare you to dispute the beauty of those JPG booties!) seen above, I have saved my favorite Parisian shoes for last.  And that collection comes from Balenciaga.

Would that I were in a cleverer frame of mind,  I would write odes to these shoes and their squared off toes and their little heel nubbins and their simple primary color palette and their architectural style.  If you love these shoes like I do and are feeling more eloquent than me, please oh please OH PLEASE, feel free to share your own odes in the comments to this post.  I’m so tempted to promise away my first born for those red ones on the left.

SS12 Fashion Week Footwear: Milanese Mixed Bag

One of the things I love about the international merry-go-round of Fashion Week is that each country and the designers who show there offers up some overall style trends that can always be counted on to give that land its particular flavor.  New York’s is the most malleable, but tends to be pretty slick and sleek, as I think you can see from our many NYC Fashion Week posts.

London’s got a cheekiness to it, typified by Acne’s shoes that took standard loafer elements and sent them through some Alice in Wonderland quirks of size and proportion.

And Milan… Milan likes to push the envelope with glam and over-the-top.

Sometimes it’s in subtle ways like the playfully sculpted heels at the Bottega Veneta show.

Sometimes it’s like a BeDazzler got to them, like these No 21 pumps (talk about shoes for a New Year’s Eve party).

But just as often, Milan’s shows could be used to define OTT, like these Versace hoofers that are due to show up on Lady Gaga’s tootsies any day now.

Or these Blumarine offerings that look like someone drank a couple bottles of smooth Italian red, found the appliqué machine and went wild.

Taking the cake for Milanese excess this season, though, has got to be Missoni, who sent a flutter of flowers down the runway in bright plastics and large scale and mixed materials and clear heels and just about every other element they could possible cram in there.

Brava, Italia, for keeping the fun in Fashion Week.

SS12 Fashion Week Footwear, Kreayshawn Style

That’s right.  Milan’s bringing us the goods Kreayshawn is too cool to sport.  Not the Louis Louis part, but we’ve got the Gucci Gucci, the Fendi Fendi, and the Prada, and I like them in basically that order.

So I’m going to do the same.

Gucci Gucci:

Retro and glam, sure, but kind of ho-hum.

Fendi Fendi:

Love the architectural heel and the funky mix of materials, but there’s something very Banana Republic about this to me, and while I love me some Banana for wardrobe basics, it’s not really what I want to see from the runways.

But then we get to Prada.  Oh, Prada, how delightfully quirky are your shoes.  Always.  Prada shoes can reliably be counted on to BRING IT, and this collection is no exception.  It’s like a time travel trip via pink Cadillac to the coolest, sleekest 1950s diner there ever was.  Hot rods and high fashion: the combination I never knew I wanted.  And so I’m going to stop yammering and finish this post out with the Prada goodies.  Kreayshawn, I don’t think this is footwear for basic bitches… just sayin’.

SS12 Fashion Week Footwear: Spotlight on Unique for Topshop

Yesterday was the Unique for Topshop show in London, and in case you couldn’t tell from these two detail shots of some of the outfits and their motifs and accessories, the theme was EGYPT EGYPT EGYPT!!!

Get it?!  EGYPT!!

With the gold and the collar necklaces and just in case you still didn’t get it, massive images of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra all over the place.

Frankly, I found the clothes tacky and like the worst of what Topshop has to offer trendy young London hipsters, as opposed to the high end of the international label, which is what the Unique collection was supposed to be.

However, we’re here to talk shoes, right?  And shoes is what this collection did best.  They did a whole line of platform flats with fun lacing and ankle straps and gold and wing details that, when divorced from the clothing emphasizing the same things, are pretty freakin’ awesome.  Plus, the gold toenail polish is a nice touch, too.

And then there were the heels.  You can’t see the inclusion of tortoise shell patterning on the platforms above (it’s a thin layer between the gold and the color of the platform), but there’s a nice chunk of it on the heel on the left below.  I love the wing details on the back of the shoe (if you want your own winged sandals without waiting for next Spring, you could follow Trainingheels’ advice and pick up Rachel Comey’s red wedges) and the notched heel that’s also on the beige shoes at the right, where the gold heel comes across as just the right amount of bling without being garish.

So my advice would be skip all the Topshop Unique clothes and keep your funds for the footwear.