Acrobatic Mind

Hah! It's just like me to go from a flattening down shoe stance to then talking about heels.  I blame the combination of the excessive LuisaviaROAMING and the motions of my hamster shoe wheel which jolted my memory back to Paris when I discovered that shoe designer Nicole Brundage has launched a new line for S/S 10 entitled Acrobats of God.

“I am on the edge…. I am an explorer of questions and answers, a life trend-setter…. I am a performer on the frontier of my movements, on the edge of my thoughts, my style….. I stretch between the adrenoline of flying and the satisfaction of landing. I am searching for the extraordinary in the ordinary…. I am an Acrobat of God, a diplomat of my perceptions, my own fashion, and I bring grace and style into the every-day kaleidoscope of wonder and energetic inspiration…..”

I am admittedly guffing at such a err…colourful press statement where clearly the writer has taken to the term 'creative writing' like a duck to water…

In laymen's terms the shoes from the Acrobats of God collection is Brundage's exploration of a more comfortable, wearable shoe, with oodles of elastic at her disposal to make that happen.  It is of course the abundance of this most functional yet aestheticaly appealing material; the humble elastic, that piqued my interest when I saw the line in Paris.  It's a stooopidly easy trick to give a bit of criss-cross action to a length of elastic on the ankle and thus a plain old shoe is suddenly a lot more interesting.  So Brundage has taken this simple trick and mastered it in various ways and has combined the elastic with some unpolished wood as the sturdy heel basis for her shoes.  It goes without saying that the chunky heels where the elastic is integrated into it like a support unit is my heel of choice. 

The effect is kind of like Geppetto applying his dab hand to shoe lasts and heels and forgetting to varnish them, and then a ballerina criss-crossing the elastic in different combinations.  No, that's a rubbish analogy.  I don't even know how Geppetto got in there.  It might have been the crap version of Pinocchio I watched over Christmas.  I think I'm just trying to say that there's an unfinished quality about the heels that makes the shoes seem like the footwear equivalent of the luxury foundation/basics casual clothing lines (T by Alexander Wang, DRKSHDH by Rick Owens etc etc…)… which is a good thing, because there's TONS of elastic.  Oh yeah, that was the main point of the whole damn thing.  Plenty of lush elastic.

(Pics taken from here, Dossier, Style.IT and Design Catwalk)