It’s time for another shoe showdown.  Who do you think wore these Chanel peep-toe booties, from the Spring 2009 collection, better?    The runway model, Diane Kruger, or Alexa Chung?

I’m going to give this one to the Chanel runway model, despite the hairpiece.  Alexa looks mismatched in a biege dress with black/white booties.  While I typically love what Diane wears, the crossover messenger bag seems off with her outfit.  I have come to expect more wow from her.

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MORE Bergdorf windows! I’m obsessed I suppose, but when I went to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue to pick up my computer, I walked on the other side of the street and saw more lovely Bergdorf windows. What distressed me a bit there and at Club Monaco was that some of the mannequins didn’t have shoes on. People who are the window dressers! How can you avoid the opportunity to shod your mannequins’ feet???

Lovely boho chic summer-in-the-Hamptons mannequins, but where are the shoes??? Not even sandals? You can’t have me believing Upper East Side ladies go around the beach without gorgeous sandals on!

Poor shoeless mannequins. All those lovely sandals in the department store collection and you don’t get to wear any!

Luckily, some of the other windows sported these lovelies tickling the ivories’ pedals:

How delightful and punny is this bowling-over of Chanel shoes? Think I should try wearing a pair of the classic white ones with black toe caps to the new Blue Ribbon-food-sponsored bowling alley in Williamsburg? Wonder how they’d go over as strike-and-spare-in-style shoes.

Ooh, gorgeous tornado heel. Shall we start making all our shoes weather-themed? I’ll design one called, Why Does New York Feel Like Seattle This Summer? It’ll be a Wellie-style bootie with stormclouds, umbrellas, sad faces and permanent crystal raindrops.

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It’s no mystery that at Fashion Week, the shoes worn by the editrixes, bloggers, and other assorted fashionistas can be just as fabulous, if not even better than what we’re seeing on the runway. Who do you think actually goes and buys those shoes anyway? So this is going to be a completely covetable, drool-worthy photo essay of Fashion Week Shoes: Off the Runway.

Let’s set the stage. Picture yourself at the Bryant Part. You are surrounded by fashionable folk and hangers on. Photographers hang out by all the entrances smoking and cracking jokes. Masses of people line the front and back of the tents, hoping to catch a glimpse of a famous person or to slip by security. You are not concerned with this as you blithely bypass security and stroll into the Tents. Since Fashion Week is Barbie themed this year, the first thing you see is the giant barbie sign. Each letter filled with Barbie in her many different iterations:

There are life-size barbies standing in a field of (real!) pink painted apples.

Are you getting into the mood?

Now check out the fabulous shoes that are literally just standing around:

Ok so these are not the gorgeous spiky Christian Louboutin for Rodarte heels that Rachel Weisz wore on the October cover of Vogue, BUT I was still pretty impressed that these lookalikes were being worn in public by a (regular?) person.

Red Hot Hoofers wander around, waiting for their close-up Mr. DeMille.

Studded Gladiator Sandals with cuffed jeans? Is that Katie Holmes? (Sadly, no. But her influence is clear.)

Furry Fabulosity! It may have been 45 degrees outside, but arctic fashion is SO in right now

Cut-outs are fun! (Well, the girl on the left was having fun. She was pretty agile in those booties. But the girl on the right was literally being completely held up by her date. She could not move on her own!

All Around Cool

I hope you have enjoyed my little Fashion Week photo story. May the shoe gods smile down on you!

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Each fashion season, it’s always fun for me to see what the designers do to that shoe part called the heel. Paris Fashion Week tends to bring out the most beautiful and sometimes the most outlandish heels of all the fashion shows and Paris Spring 2009 was no exception. Here’s a quick retrospective of the heels. Which were your favorite?

John Galliano swirly metallic platform shoe

Alexander McQueen amber heel and tornado heel

Miu Miu and the painted wedge with burlap sack bow heel

Lanvin bejeweled heel

Chanel duster heel

Stella McCartney clear chunky heel

Dior fertility goddess heels

YSL and the wireframe heels

My personal favorite was the YSL wireframe heel above.
Photos from Style.com

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While the Armani Prive spring 2008 couture show featured some titillating high heel fashion that had me wondering how the models walked on daggers, Karl Lagerfield kept in simple, girly, and presumably comfy on the Chanel Couture runway. Seemingly, he seemed to channel Coco Chanel who once said “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.”

To wit, there was nary a single high heel on the fashion runway.

Of course these sequined flats could only go with this tweed number.

My favorite flats on the runway were these soft pink mary janes with ruffles on the vamp and side. Can’t you just image that one of the ballerinas in Edgar Degas‘ paintings would wear these?

Sadly, the remainder of the shoes on the Chanel runway were just a bit too plain for me.

and left me wishing that we could see updated, comfy versions of this lovely silver banded flat.

Photos from Style.com

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