Spring Has Sprung! Time to Win Free Shoes!

Here are the deets:

To enter to win a pair of Danskos, leave a comment here with the style, color, and size you’d like.

To enter to win a pair of Danskos AND a $50 gift certificate to Nordstroms, leave that comment here, and add a pic to our Facebook wall (photo-sharing apps like Instagram are easy or, hell, your digital camera will do just fine) of something in your wardrobe that you’d pair with your new Dansko’s.  The Shoeblog community’s got great personal style!  Share some of it with us! (PS–make sure you link to the FB post in your comment here, so we can correctly count your double entry.)

The contest will run from now until next Monday, April 2 2012 at 11:59PM Zulu/GMT.  Show us the goods, and you might get goods of your very own!

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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.

Spring 2012 Fashion Week Footwear: More Updates from the Runways

Of the most recent crop of runway shoes out there, I was smitten by… wait, no.  I’ll save the smitten-making shoes til the end.  What I’ll start with instead is another trend I’ve been seeing a fair bit of: transparency.

Like these from three from Marchesa.  The collection was floaty and ethereal and romantic, and the transparent shoes matched that with some gorgeous graceful lines.

Oscar de la Renta also showed us some transparent shoes, though in that show there was quite a bit of playing with colors and socks underneath to make the transparency show up very differently (god, I just typed that “shoe up very differently” at first… guess what I’ve been thinking about this week).  I dig the oxford inspiration and the buckles and the ankle straps… but you’re probably getting tired of me mentioning those things this week.

The next triad here is three shoes from three shows that I loved.  Left to right we have Narciso Rodriguez’s take on a super high class Ace bandage, Sophie Theallet’s spectator-inspired pump that looks like murder to wear but is so damn adorable (plus double buckles!), and one more by Oscar de la Renta that was a mule so beautifully embellished and so reminiscent of something Marie-Antoinette might have slipped on that I couldn’t pass it up.

But the shoes that had me smitten (you’ve been patient until now, after all) were the shoes that out Lepore’d Nanette Lepore for quirky feminine… Tory Burch.  I was hella surprised, I must admit, because usually I find Tory Burch shoes insipid and ubiquitous, and Nanette Lepore usually does the quirky feminine to a T.  But first, look at the Nanette Lepore offering, of which I only present one to save your retinas some serious searing.

You can click on that image and enlarge it, but you might want to put some sunglasses on first.

OK, back with me?  Sunspots cleared from your vision?  Well if you want to cool things down a little, then check out the adorableness (and look! some low heels!) of Tory Burch’s offerings and coo in delight that these may be coming to a store near you in a matter of months.

SS Fashion Week Footwear: Runway Drive-by

OK, friends, I have lots of interesting shoes to share from the NYC runways, so here goes.

We start before the jump with this one from Preen, which I put here, not because I like it or want to wear it or think it would be comfortable, but because it answers the question What would it look like if LEGOs and doilies and bikers had a baby and it took the form of footwear? And since that’s a question I just know you were all asking yourselves, I didn’t want to keep the answer from you one second longer.

And I will give you this one, too, from the Carolina Herrera show, because rarely have I seen a shoe that looks THIS painful to wear.

Now follow along after the cut for many more.

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SS12 Fashion Week Footwear: Derek Lam and Tommy Hilfiger

You know those multiple choice “Determine Your Style” quizzes you always find in fashion magazines and websites where they ask you a bunch of questions like “What essentials do have with you at all times?” and then they give you choices that run all the way from a) Wallet, phone, keys, and I’m good through to d) An extra pair of shoes, a change of earrings, 3 lipsticks, a rainproof trench, an Hermes scarf, the hottest smartphone of the moment, 12 credit cards, my e-reader, and the duffel-bag-sized purse to hold it all.

Yeah, those.

Anyway, I always come out of those being the girl who’s based in the classics and jazzes things up with accessories and mixtures of color and material.  So it should come as no surprise that as SS12 Fashion Week continues, my two favorite footwear collections so far have been Derek Lam and Tommy Hilfiger, both designers whose visions are based in the classics (of American sportswear) and jazzed up with mixtures of color and material.

Derek Lam took some simple silhouettes and combined texture and detail in playful ways, seen up at the top of this post.  And Tommy Hilfiger did this collection of loafers and boat shoes gone upscale in bright bold colors.  The mix of fabrics and patterns and patent leather and gold (love those stripes on the heels) have just about made me swoon.