Mad for Manolos
IN MY SHOES: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was at the biannual Manolo Blahnik sample sale at the Warwick Hotel last week (“[n]ot since Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilated their feet to squeeze into that glass slipper have women leveled such fierce desire at footwear”) where she amused herself “waiting for the other shoe to drop”:
It didn’t take long.
“Mademoiselle!” André Leon Talley barked at a young woman fondling a black cutout ankle boot. “That is too dominatrix for you!”
She turned a gimlet eye on the vast Vogue editor sprawled resplendently in a chair, wearing a Frank Sinatra pork-pie hat, a maroon shirt and trousers from Marrakesh, and a Paloma Picasso burnt-velvet vintage scarf.
“I want to be a dominatrix,” she told him, before dropping the boot, which was pounced on by a pride of women prowling like big cats about to tear into an antelope on Animal Planet. …
Talley has been ringmaster of this sartorial circus for three years running. …
He separates a single woman from a pair of S&M stilettos. “They will help you get a night,” he cautions, “not a boyfriend.” …
But he urges a third to risk some white Mongolian lamb boots mounted on shiny white patent leather: “Oh baby, you’ve got the hot little body for cheerleader boots. Wear them in Gstaad or St. Moritz.”
She murmurs that she doesn’t have that life. He bellows, “Darling, those boots will get you that life!”
Talley knows that if clothes make the man, stilettos make the woman.
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