” for her upcoming couture line. The collaboration with a student at London’s Central Saint Martins art school, Myah Hasbany, brings to mind a sea monster — or something more phallic.
“Shoes are totems of disembodied lust. They are candy for the eyes, poetry for the feet, icing on your soul. They stand for everything you’ve ever wanted,” wrote author Mimi Pond in the 1985 book Shoes Never Lie. “The earliest known shoes were crudely tanned animal skins that wrapped around the foot like a modern-day sandal or moccasin,” says Kevin Martel, founder of men’s shoe brand Martel+Ram.
The former philosophy points to shoes that are beautiful, unique or outright bizarre, but uncomfortable or impractical, while the latter are those uber-practical shoes that keep you comfortably on your toes for a long period of time. “In addition to altering the shape of the foot, the practice also produced a particular sort of gait that relied on the thigh and buttock muscles for support. From the start, foot-binding was imbued with erotic overtones,” says the Smithsonian.