Tag Archives: New Yorker

Taking My Shoe Conversations to the Web and in Monologue Form

The New Yorker has an excellent article by Lauren Collins on Christian Louboutin in the March 28, 2011, issue–an issue that features a gorgeous cover. The entire article is worth reading, but here are two quotes that made it into my circle-and-rip-the-page-out category:

Louboutin, however, is not sympathetic to complaints about the deleterious effects of high heels on locomotion. He told me a story about a client who, having bought her first pair of his heels, was forced to slacken the pace of her morning walk. “She began to notice the little details of her neighborhood for the first time,” he said, proudly.

This is a different and more positive spin to the high-heels-are-painful line of thinking I make, which is that if you are walking or on your feet long enough that you feel pain, you are dating the wrong guy.

Also:

“When a woman buys a pair of shoes, she never looks at the shoe,” Louboutin said. “She stands up and looks in the mirror, she looks at the breast, the ass, from the front, from the side, blah blah blah. if she likes herself, then she considers the shoe.”

Coach is not Couture

The New Yorker has a solid piece on Coach’s Reed Krakoff that is, unfortunately, behind its paywall. I write “unfortunately”, because all those women who rock Coach are not able to read the piece and realize the brand is the exact opposite of fashionable–a sentiment I stopped trying to convince people of years ago.

Because, and thankfully, Coach buyers are not a subset of New Yorker subscribers, here are a couple choice nuggets:

Krakoff’s detractors think that he is a brand architect who made a fortune at Coach by marketing middlebrow goods to barely fashionable consumers…”

and

At Coach, Krakoff designs for a clientele–ranging from upmarket homemakers to their babysitters–whose sensibility is markedly different from his.

The Latest Fashion: Eliminate Copyrights And Patents

The New Yorker has a great article about a study done that identifies the lack of copyrights and patents in the fashion industry as a major source of the industry’s continued success. The article is definitely a good read, although I do not know why the author is so stubborn (at the end) in thinking a similar model would not work for all or most other industries.

The article is particularly timely for me, because I have been reading a history of fashion and thinking about the related IP issues. I guess this article and study saves me the trouble of having to write one.