Armadillo Shoes Steals The Show!

Beauty is pain

If you call yourself a fashionista, think again.


Only a handful of people are actually wearing the single hottest fashion item for this year, spring collection 2010. It's not being mass-produced. It's barely sold in stores.

Alexander McQueen's "armadillo boots," those giant claw-like Pedi-crustaceans which is 24 cm high, or nearly 10 inches that lifted models a foot off his Paris catwalk last fall, are unquestionably the oddest and most brilliant thing to come out of couture in recent memory. McQueen, a London-based designer who has definitely show the world finally got a look at the mammoth boots when McQueen became the first major designer to live-stream his runway show on October 6 last year. It was the ultimate democratic experience of high fashion: Everyone could see them, no one could have them.

In all, 21 pairs of the shoes exist, which 20 are from the runway show and one additional one. According to a McQueen press officer, most have already been sold to private collectors, "people who understood they are pieces of art rather than just a pair of shoes. The company has been inundated with requests and is now considering auctioning off what few pairs remain, “for charity purposes”.


It is no more of a surprise, the talented international celebrity, Lady Gaga who is famous with her odd dress up is first who wore the gem-encrusted hooves in her popular "Bad Romance" video. She can't seem to take them off. “Who cares if you can't buy or walk in them? This is an art” said the celebrity herself.

It is a beauty and the beast. It is fashion design but it takes into account an awareness of the body that's beyond even most brilliant designers. None of this is to say the boot is remotely sexy. But neither is natural selection, the melting of the polar ice caps, the return of humanity to the same primordial sea from which we emerged. A dystrophy fantasy about the outer limits of evolution is of a piece with his usual genius. That these crazy shoes have become a hit with a 23-year-old pop princess and her legions of admirers should be taken as a good sign: Not everything is cheap or cute, not even now.