Fashion Wednesday: Wedge Boots
November 25th, 2009
posted by Roisin Kiberd
You can run, but you can’t run on cobblestones. Short of the notorious thigh-high boots, wedges are the most coveted shoe trend of Autumn/Winter 2009, and the latest models take quirky detail and chunky soles to a new high.
In shoe history, wedges are synonymous with the seventies. Their golden age was that of Fiurucci and Ferregamo, clog-like wooden soles and platform boots by Biba. Winter 2009’s shoe harvest draw in Barbara Hulanicki’s inky colour scheme of olive green and deep purple leather, with lace-up boots treading the line somewhere between baseball boots and quaint Victoriana. The abiding trend is a choice of lace-up ’shoe boots’ or moulded, minimal leather, creating an eerie fluid line so that feet look like animal hooves.
With their gleaming silver soles, vertiginous platform and smooth black leather, Acne’s ‘Atacoma’ wedges have become legend in the fashion blogosphere, also triggering a run on their lower-priced cousin, the Jeffrey Campbell ‘99′ (join the waiting list here)
Topshop designed a similar knock-off, called the ‘April’ wedge, but their website has been sold out of them since October. The best of what remains include Irregular Choice’s rocking-horse soled ‘What an Angel‘, Office’s ‘Minky Linky‘ and Tophop’s models by guest designers Ashish and Emma Cook. Or if €455 sounds reasonable, these devilish Rick Owens lace-ups might well fit the bill
Wedges might look unfeasibly high and unwalkable on pavements, but this is rarely the case with even the highest soles. The beauty of wedges is their all-terrain nature, the durability of wearing an enormous clump of rubber on your feet. Heels get stuck in cobblestones and put pressure on the balls of feet; wedges, on the other hand, support the feet and cushion them with a heavy sole, while the clunky, solid heel can take on most uneven surfaces. In this season’s leather wedge ’shoe-boots’, so high they might well help you survive a flood, feet are kept warm and toasty and raised a good three to four inches above the street level. Another qualm people raise is whether they’re too heavy and tiring to wear. But most of this season’s wedges are have a lightweight rubber base, or soles that are completely hollow. The exception is the Ashish for Topshop leopard wedge, which -we know from various shop-floor test runs- is incredibly heavy to walk in. Still, the weight lends a certain momentum and gravity to your walk, and the all-round visual stunningness ( take your pick of plain black, leopard skin or zebra!) makes these monster wedges worth the effort.
The final problem; will they make me look like an alien? Yes, perhaps. They’ll add up noticeably to your height, and your legs will look disproportionately skinny. But who doesn’t like the sound of that? And those added inches will give you whole new perspective on the world. Wedge-wearing celebrities include Chloe Sevigny (who wears her own designs for Opening Ceremony) and Mary Kate Olsen, whose signature look pairs clumpy shoes with laddered tights, Starbucks and a vacant-eyed expression.
Tags: fashion wednesday, wedge boots
