Of Cowpies, Fryes, and Dyes

In a 2009 post Madame Shock did what she does best (pish posh, dahlings, no tittering, it's ONE of the things she does best): buying Louboutins for half-price and dyeing them to fit her fancy.

Madame Chausseurs - sorely put out by a victory on her own territoire - sniffed that c'est tres simple bien sur to dye suede, but leather is a whole different animal (yes, technically the same animal, but treated differently and...well, we digress...).  

Shhhh, it's pigskin...

It just so happened that Madame Chic had been shopping at that very moment.  Yes, imagine - shopping!  Standing in a tiny boutique in a tinier Wyoming town she was desperate for some very tall footwear to separate her dainty soles from the omnipresent muddy, mottled, gray-brown muck.  Madame had been blissfully enjoying a secret rendezvous on a private ranch until her dire lack of sturdy chausseurs began to threaten the romance. 

Never one to throw away a man for lack of appropriate footwear, she had located acceptable - cute, even - Frye platform kiltie brogues in the only boutique in town but - quelle horreur! - the only remaining pair taunted her from the shelf in a muddy, mottled gray-brown the precise shade of the very muck she was desperate to avoid. 

But what to do?  And what to do vite vite, before another Cowpie-in-the-Peeptoes debacle ruined another romantic, candlelight dinner in a private tent on the pampas (or whatever the term is for amber waves of grain that hide cowpies from unsuspecting fashionistas)?  The suspense! The drama! But never fear...we would never leave Madame Chic stranded with date pains in the great plains as fate reigns ... 

Everything always comes back to Audrey...

Oh, excuse nous, s'il vous plait ...the Mesdames got sidetracked in a little My Fair Lady reverie just at the exciting point in the story!  What did Madame Chic do to rescue her romance and her pieds?!  She called Madame Shock right on the spot (well, technically not on the spot, because super-secret ranches in tiny Wyoming towns get simply PAS de cell reception, but we'll skip that part of the story...).  And after a quick trip to the drugstore down the street and a purchase of one bottle of black shoe polish...voila!  You'd never know they were anything other than standard, reassuring, big-city-girl black, n'est pas?

Perfectly Un-Cowpie Black

Reduce, Reuse, Re:Shoes

It took years to admit, but even we have our limits: these lovely Courreges and Salvatore Ferragamo shoes inherited from dear Aunt Mae just can't be made currently elegant, no matter how we train our combined resources on it. She may have worn them proudly on the Queen Elizabeth, but we wouldn't even wear them in Queens.

They are simply, definitely, hopelessly frumpy and outdated. Not even a staggering platform (see entry on Add-An-Inch) can help. And the Courreges are so oddly speckled with - something - it looks like Auntie Mae either took up spray painting graffiti in her old age or stored them in a fly-ridden attic (no fair guessing which was more likely). Clearly not even fit for the charity bin.

So...what's a chic inheritee, with proper respect for the deceased and the environment, going to do? Reuse, Reshoes, Re...news! Renews. Renew. Get it?

Ah. What elements can we reuse in a renewed way? Unless you've got a fabulous idea for re-purposing antique leather shoe soles, worn thin by repeated trips to bingo and the local pharmacist, we're going with the always-hip logo buckles on the toes. We are particularly fond of the Courreges ones since they are so very French and classic and underexposed.

To cut a long (and largely self-congratulatory) essay short: the shoe buckles look marvelous woven onto a ribbon or thin scarf and incorporated into a headband. Three look better than two (see any interior decorator's book on "groupings" in odd numbers), and a mix is much more elegant than everything from the same designer (see same entry) .

You can also thread your recovered shoe baubles on a small scarf (like those half-price, half-size Hermes items) and knot them "casually" around the handle of your favorite handbag. But we leave it to your discretion as to whether that has been worn into the ground like, um, a certain relative's leather shoe soles.

Now...how DID she get lurid speckles all over her church pumps?

Add-An-Inch

Ah yes, we could make many jokes about that, yes? But we don't have time, because we have something really important to discuss: SHOES!

Do you have a pair of shoes that you absolutely adore but are just not... fresh anymore? (We won't betray our age by admitting that there's anything snicker-able about that line, either.)

Anyway - take a shoe like our adored black satin pump with gold jeweled heel by Todd Oldham (before he sold out to every cheap licenser in town...). Hmmm. Such a lovely shoe. Now why don't we wear it? Perhaps because we have grown accustomed to towering, swaggering, sashaying through town on platforms that would make the Sun King swoon?

Well, just like said Solar Monarch you need to develop your court following. And first and foremost you need: a great shoe repair guy! Take those beloved but embarrassingly un-elevated shoes hence, and ask for a platform under sole and heel. Voila! Much better.

The caveat, we have found, is not to grasp more than you can chew (bite off more than you can..catch?) - whatever - basically just don't get over-ambitious and go too high. We are messing with nature here: the gods didn't favor those poor shoes with a healthy platform from birth, so pushing them too far (or high) toward fashionability will throw off the balance and end disasterously. (Look what happened to Courtney Love, after all.) Seriously, take heed: you can turn your Shannen Dohertys into Tina Feys but they'll never be Angelina Jolies.

Now, go gather those dusty, lonely shoes and give them new life! My shoe guy insists that the platforms can be easily removed when trends swing toward paper-thin soles again. At any rate, I'm sure it will be an easier job than making our ego adjust to being normal height again...

(Stay tuned for shoe repair guy, part II, where he actually makes our Louboutins more valuable)