Wherein You Get To Be Style Spy's Editor

Here it comes!!!!






New York Fashion Week is almost upon us. There will be A LOT of fashion.

A LOT.

Here's the schedule:





Seriously. Are they kidding me with this? And, of course, this is just New York. London, Milan, and Paris will all follow in the next several weeks. I don't think any one human being can be expected to even look at all that stuff let alone write coherently about it. So here's what we're going to do -- you're going to pick which shows you want me to review. Take a gander at the shows going down (if you click on the chart it'll take you to the website where you might find it easier to read) and make note of the ones you're interested in, then leave a comment after this post telling me which ones they are. Any shows that get votes from readers will be collections I'll try to review here on the blog. I'm not going to absolutely promise to get to all of them, but I'll do my best. More votes = a greater likelihood I'll talk about it, so speak up out there if you have a favorite. There may also be a few that don't get any votes except mine, but well... hey, it's my blog. Shows I'm not going to review, no matter how much you beg: Thom Browne (so over it), Tory Burch (raiding the closet of country club matrons from the 60's is not fashion design), Gottex (Swimsuits. Don't care.), JCPenney (Ummmmm, PTB at Fashion Week? That's a retail outlet, not a fashion designer.), and Cho Cheng (because I'm pretty sure that's a Harry Potter character).

On second thought, I think I want to see what's up with Cho Cheng. She's had a rough time of it, what with the murdered boyfriend and Harry dumping her for Ron's sister and all that jazz. So go ahead & vote for her if you're interested. Girlfriend needs a break.

But I digress.

Ya know, it's funny. I look at that chart and see aaaaaaall those names and aaaaaaaall those fashion shows and know that there's three more just like that coming up soon; not to mention all the so-called Fashion Weeks that happen in places like Buenos Aires and Moscow and Johannesburg and Ulan Bator and Muskogee and Alice Springs and McMurdo Station and I think, "If there's so damn many fashion designers out there, why do we all have so much trouble finding trousers that fit???" It just seems that -- looking at it purely as a numbers game -- someone would've figured that shit out. It's one of life's great mysteries, huh?




Images: frillr.com

The Onslaught Begins

Fashion Week for Spring 09 (if you can believe that) got started in NYC this weekend, and I read in the New York Times that there appear to be something like over 260 different shows on the schedule, so you're going to have to forgive me if I don't cover everything. Good lord, that's ridiculous. I mean, I love fashion, and I love looking at the stuff that saunters down the runway as much or more than most bipeds, but I gotta tell you -- I start getting downright resentful every time I click onto the Style.com homepage and see the list of covered shows get longer... and longer... and longer... It's impossible to keep up. And New York bleeds into London blurs into Milan runs into Paris. I despair of keeping up, but I'll check in when I can.

So here are a few highlights so far...

Charles Nolan isn't one of fashion's heavy hitters, but I see his stuff in the Austin Saks all the time and I usually like it -- it's good, well-designed sportswear and separates, not crushingly expensive. My current favorite white blouse is by him, and here's another one that I'm going to keep an eye out for because it really gets me excited.

Nolan's collection this time out had a 20's theme, and this was one of my favorite iterations of it:

What a lovely dress. I'm going to want to wear that next summer -- so easy & elegant.

Usually I'm a tremendous fan of Jonathan Saunders -- I think he's one of the most talented young designers out there. He does great construction and most of all, he has a delirious and delightfully brilliant way with color. Those elements were definitely there this time around, but... I thought a lot of the collection missed the mark by being too forced.

There are many things about this that I just love in theory, the fantastic tailoring on the jacket and the great detailing of the skirt, and yes, the ballsy/perfect combination of colors. And yet... not quite.

There's something too mannered about this -- the curve of the neck and the whacked-out peplum... I'm not afraid of extreme, lord knows, but this is just too much. It doesn't cohere, to me, it's out of balance (although get ready, friends, for tons and tons and metric tons of this proportion -- large & constructed between the waist and knees, offset by narrow on top. It's all springing from this:

from myboyfriendStefanoPilati's last collection for YSL. Many people hated this, but I loved it, and so did just about every fashion editor alive, and I'm here to tell you it's the silhouette that ate everything this year. But more about that later.)

I mean, this just looks like something that would get you auf'd on Project Runway.

There were, fortunately, some things from Saunders that indicated this silliness is a temporary condition:

Oh, that puts me right over the edge. How fantastic, how dreamy, how chic. I want to wear that very badly.

And here is the masterful geometric use of color he's so brilliant at. I think that's just beyond gorgeous, and so very deftly handled when it could just be a nightmare. It reminds me of one of those kaleidoscopes I had as a kid with the bits of brightly colored plastic in them. Just beautiful.


Everyone wants to be Miuccia:

Preen

Tuleh

Expect lots & lots more lace this season, although I'm sure Miuccia Prada has moved on to goodness knows what (Bathmats? Oh, wait, she's already done that. Scuba suits? Oh, yeah, been there, too. Maybe astroturf...) already and will view all these lace garments with one raised eyebrow and dismiss them with an unperturbed (and grindingly chic) Milanese shrug.

Here's more of that diamond-shaped silhouette:

DKNY
(But Just Say No to Hi-Tops. A public service announcement brought to you by Style Spy.)

Tibi

Preen -- note also, more lace

Now, before everyone just rolls their eyes up into their heads or starts jumping up & down & screaming about how awful that is, let's take a moment. Truth be told, most women are pear-shaped. And yet, fashion never is. So we squeeze our pear-shaped selves into long tubular shapes that never quite do what we need them to. But these looks, friends, are already pear-shaped, quite unmistakably and deliberately so. This is a GOOD thing. That black dress with the red obi by Tibi (Say that out loud: red obi by Tibi. It's fun.) is quite stunning, and even an extremely hippy woman is going to look absolutely marvelous in it. The same with the jodphur-shaped pants: there is room in there for what you need room for. A GOOD thing. A lot of folks, myself included, have a knee-jerk reaction to this shape because we've been taught (brainwashed, if you like) that the acceptable, desirable shapes for women are either very long and very lean (Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, every model on every catwalk) or hourglass (Salma Hayek, Catherine Zeta-Jones). I say, if the Fashion PTBs wanna give us pears, we should buy them like crazy so that they keep giving them to us, happily wiggle our pear-shaped butts into them and revel in the chic.

I love this. You wouldn't even need Spanx!!


And this dress makes me crazy:

Great shape, not to mention I am over the moon for that print. Gorgeous.


And one more completely random thing, just because I'm head over heels in love with it:

Tuleh

Bryan Bradley knows how to make a dingdong dress, let me tell you. This may be the Perfect Dress for me. Oh, what a gorgeous thing.

I'll be back with more when I can! Until then, hit Style.com's coverage (they've upgraded their photo coverage and you can now view things full-screen, which is great) and don't miss Cathy Horyn's blog on NYTimes.com -- she's posting like a maniac, and there's some great stuff on there, including postings with videos from guest blogger Eric Wilson. Eat your Fashion Wheaties and roll up your sleeves, it's going to be a bumpy ride!


Photos: Style.com

Avant-Sniffage

These are the Comme des Garçons Series 3: Incense fragrances.



They are little miracles. Each one of them is devoted to a different location on the planet where you can find an important place of worship that features a distinctive incense: Avignon in France, Jaisalmer in India, Ouarzazate in Morocco , Kyoto in Japan, and Zagorsk in Russia. A lot of people are put off by the appellation "incense fragrance." They expect that you're going to smell like a head shop if you wear them. Au contraire. These are lovely, peaceful, surprisingly clean scents that teach us exactly how imprecise the English language can be and how so often fragrance can fill in those blanks. I've worn Kyoto for quite a while now, I bought my bottle of it here:


This is the exterior of the Comme de Garçons perfume boutique in the Place du Marché St. Honoré in Paris, designed by Takao Kawasaki and Future Systems, under the aegis of Rei Kawakubo, design genius and mogul who is the heart and soul of Comme des Garçons. The boutique is only a slim storefront -- here's the interior:



It's like a giant glossy white snowbank. The only thing sold in this hushed yet welcoming space is Comme des Garçons fragrances, of which I am a big, big fan. Here's another series (2:Red) I particularly like:

(In case you can't read those: Carnation, Harissa, Palisander, Rose, Sequoia)

Less arcane, this one, a little more straightforward. Harissa has been one of my great fragrance loves for a long time now -- I don't think it's appreciated in the way it should be in the frag community. It's bright, sunny, warm, refreshing, a little green... nothing else in the world smells like Harissa. It's my sunshine-in-a-bottle. I'm also a huge lover of Sequoia, which gives Serge Lutens' Chêne a run for its money as my favorite cedar-based fragrance.

(If you want to learn more about CdG fragrances (and there are many more that I'm not showing you), go here. If you're interested in shopping for them, go here. Trust me, they're well-worth their very reasonable prices, with the bonus that they are all very compatible with men or women, so anyone can wear them. Harissa, Kyoto, and Sequoia are all divine on men.)

While I was in New York, I was charged with picking up a bottle of Harissa for a client (a man, by the way, a very distinguished tweed-clad Welsh professor, which just goes to show you) and since I've been living on decants for quite a while, I figured I might as well score one for myself as well. So I hied myself down to the CdG boutique in Chelsea (see yesterday's post) for some sniffage.

(A note: I will never be allowed to live in Chelsea because apparently you are required to have either a dog or a child -- or some combination in multiples of both -- and I do not have and never will have either. Lovely neighborhood, though, all gentrified up just as nice as you please. Soon there will be nothing but lovely neighborhoods left in Manhattan, which is great for the realtors & developers but less than stellar for regular ol' non-millionaires who want to live there.)

Here is the entrance to the Comme des Garçons boutique on 22d Street:


And here is the entrance from inside:



The entire interior is the same smooth white plastic as the perfume boutique in Paris (I didn't make it into the CdG clothing boutiques there). It is "futuristic," but not nearly as forbidding or Logan's Run as that sounds. It is, as one would expect, the perfect place to find Rei Kawakubo's & Junya Watanabe's super-cool clothes.

Like this:


This is a seriously beautiful thing. Now, a lot of people dismiss Comme des Garçons as just wacky, impossible-to-wear avant-garde nonsense, but I implore you not to do that. I will be honest and say that while there are always at least a few pieces in any given CdG collection that I absolutely love, an entire closet filled with it would be a bit... much... for me. But. They are art, these things. Wearable art.




This jacket is so unbelievably complicated and beautiful and bewitching -- I could have stared at it for hours, and if I'd had a couple thousand extra smackers lying around it would be hanging in my closet right now. These are clothes that definitely tell the world you are more invested in style than in fashion. They are not trendy. They will be as amazing and challenging in 20 years as they are today, and that is the genius of Rei and Junya and all the other artisans and designers and craftsmen she has gathered around herself for the last 30 years.

(Comme des Garçons Spring 2007)

They are not the usual. One has to put aside certain preconceptions about clothes to love them, and not everyone can, in the same way not everyone can bring themselves to love non-figurative art.

Mark Rothko, Light Red Over Black

Rothko's art is one of my happy places. It brings me great joy to stand in front of one of his colorfield paintings, just like that jacket brought me joy in the Comme des Garçons boutique.

Aaaaaaat any rate, I snagged my two bottles of Harissa and trundled on my way. My one complaint about the New York store is that while they have all of the fragrances out and available for testing, they have no fueilles (paper strips) to spray them on. Better yet, the Paris boutique has little paper cones for testing, like you might find next to a water cooler. You spritz the fragrance into the cone, give it a moment to let the alcohol evaporate (please, I BEG of you people -- let the alcohol evaporate before you sniff ANY perfume!!) and then you can get a really nice, accurate snootful of the scent as it hovers in the little cone.

By the end of the day, both of my best friends, who live in New York, had each smelled Harissa and fallen in love with it, so on Saturday we made a return pilgrimage and bought a bottle for each of them. These are two women who are wildly different, style-wise: one runs to Boden and Anthropologie, the other to button-downs and flat-front pants. But they both got the magic of Harissa. This tickles me no end.

While we were down there, I also scooped up a bottle of Jaisalmer. Oh, spicy cardamom-y, cinnamon-y, woody goodness! Next on my Comme des Garçons wishlist is Zagorsk, so if anyone is shopping for my birthday... I'm just sayin'.

Photos: doverstreetmarket.com, designboom.com, future-systems.com, style.com, tateonline.com
Rothko painting ©Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/DACS

Misadventures of a Shoe Person

Home from New York.

And very glad of it.

Don't bother to get snippy with me, New York-lovers, because I am one of you. Like the t-shirts (and bumper stickers and mouse pads and coffee cups and baseball caps and tote bags and...) say, I heart New York. I truly do. There is nowhere else like it. New York City is wonderful and hectic and exciting and sometimes so beautiful it makes my heart stop. I just don't want to live there anymore.

New York is like an old boyfriend. I'm very, very grateful for the time we had together. I wouldn't take back a single moment of it. It was a great relationship while it lasted and in large part I would not be who I am today if it hadn't happened. But it came to an end for a reason, and the reason is that we're just not right for one another. Many fond memories, but no regrets.

Plus, New York really did a number on my feet last week. Oy. They're still sore & a little bit numb in places. Evidently the old boyfriend is still holding a few grudges. I had foot trauma after shoe drama after wince-inducing incident with my feet this week, and I'd like to publicly apologize to all the people who had to listen to me bitch about it (which is a bunch). But I've never had such issues with my feet on vacation before. In three trips of stomping around Paris the last couple of years (not to mention seven years of living in & around NYC) my feet never suffered so.

It all started well enough. My first full day in the city, I moseyed in from Westchester (I stayed with my dear friend Kelly and her family -- beautiful home, amazing kids, better than any hotel) to start my day at Saks. Now, I'd had some retailing planned that I was very excited about, because due to a gift certificate and some cautious saving I had a nice little wad of scratch to toss around in the shoe department at Saks Fifth Avenue, and I was looking forward to it. To spend my day of retailing I'd worn these:


My adorable little Ferragamo ankle boots with the nice low heel. They're very comfortable, I run around in these all the time. More about them anon.

The shoes that I've been dreaming about of late are these:

Manolo Blahnik Dodo. In red, bien sûr.

I'd actually seen them at Neiman Marcus the last time I was in Dallas and tried them on and oooooooh, they're dreamy. I looked for them on the Saks website, but there are no Manolo Blahniks on the Saks website. I thought this very odd, because there are Manolo Blahniks in the shoe department of the tiny little Austin Saks, so I just chalked it up to some odd e-commerce quirk.

I got up to the shoe department on the fourth floor and it was like a dream. I made my first pass, just to survey the sitch & get my legs under me, and I noticed something troubling.

No Manolos.

No Manolos AT ALL.

I felt a cold, sinking feeling in the area around my heart and when I checked in with one of the SAs, sure enough: yes, we have no Manolos.

I was tragified.

But I took a moment, gathered my wits, and shrugged it off. Phooey! I could certainly find some other shoes to love!! And I did. I gathered up several handfuls of shoes (much to the secret dismay, I'm sure, of the much-less-shoe-motivated Kelly, who was my extremely patient shopping companion) and handed them off to Clara, the SA who nabbed me. Pradas & MiuMius & Loubies, oh my!

(I should know better with the Loubies. It doesn't seem to matter if they are open- or closed-toe, they are simply too narrow for my feet. I must resign myself to never wearing a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. This is extremely hurtful, but in time I hope to come to terms. Does anyone know of a good support group?)

Many, many pairs of shoes later, I decided on these:

YSL Doll, in red patent and suede.

They are beautiful, and they feel really good, because the straps are nice & wide & cradle the foot instead of biting into it. At least, they felt good in the moment, which was early in the shopping day and early in my trip, before all things foot-related went to hell in a handbasket.

I also fell for these:

Stuart Weitzman Slipper, in Flame (Flame!!) patent

and despite not planning to buy more than one pair of shoes that day, scooped 'em up. Adorable, comfy, tremendously all-purpose, and look at the cute doggies on the lining!!

Plus -- clever me had put off getting a Saks charge card until the day I spent a big chunk of money because I knew that most department stores give you a first day discount of 10% when you get the card, and sure enough, so does Saks! So I saved a considerable amount that way, and used my healthy gift card to make up a lot more of the rest. There is still a balance on my new Saks card, but it's not a tremendous balance, and I felt okay about it since I got two great pairs of shoes.

From Saks Kelly & I sought out a great little diner on Madison Avenue for lunch (oh, tuna melt on rye with fries smothered in brown gravy, you are one of my favorite New York meals!), and then Kelly very kindly hauled my purchases back to Westchester, where she had to return in order to make the school run to bring the kids home. From Grand Central Station I struck off for the Comme des Garçons boutique in Chelsea to do a little perfume shopping.

Now. Grand Central is at 42d Street and Park Avenue. The Comme des Garcons boutique is on 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. This is a long walk.

A very long walk.

Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking, except that it was a nice day and I hadn't been in New York in a long time & wouldn't it be nice to stroll through the city on a pleasant day like today? I did break things up a bit by stopping at the Bryant Park Café and treating myself to a mid-afternoon outdoor glass of champagne in that green and lovely space. (Bryant Park has been considerably beautified and rejuvenated since I lived in NYC -- once upon a time it was not nearly so gorgeous as it is now. Let's just say that champagne was certainly not the substance most often partaken of there.)

I also wandered through the Garment District and into M&J Trimming, the mecca of all things ribbon-y, button-y, and fringe-y. If you sew, you could lose your mind and your retirement fund in that place -- trust me when I tell you that their online site provides only a tiny glimpse into what is available. I popped into the button area, thinking I might pick up some fun buttons to take home to use on some sewing project in the future, but left, overwhelmed, pretty quickly. One should only enter this store if you have an idea of what you need -- aimlessly browsing could stretch on & on forever until one day your mouldering bones are found in a dusty heap. Fantastic fun, though.

Also on my travels I meandered through a lovely little exhibit on color in clothing throughout history at the Museum at FIT. It's a small exhibit, but I was enjoying the quiet & opportunity to sit on a nice padded bench (my dogs were really barking by this point, you see) and look at pretty dresses when the place was invaded by a shrieking horde of squawking young women around ages 14 - 15. I was flushed out of the place like a flustered chicken whose henhouse had been set upon by foxes. I smoothed my ruffled feathers, hoiked up my socks (which by this point were tragically unable to stay up on my feet and kept schlumping down inside my boots to puddle up around my arches -- oooooooooooh, I just hate that feeling) and moved on.

Needless to say, once my perfume purchases (more about which also anon -- not today) were in hand I got my subway on



& made my way back up to midtown to have more champagne and then moules et frites with a couple of friends. Post-dinner, back to GCS to catch the Harlem Line to Westchester.

By the time I got back to Kelly's house, my feet were howling. Howling. The several glasses of wine I had taken medicinally (to numb the feet) had worn off and I gimped my way up to the third-floor guest room with many a stifled moan.

The next day I had a leisurely morning and then planned to go in & spend the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art (always my favorite) and then more drinks & dinner with friends that evening. Some combination of foot pain, foolishness, and a false sense of security (my plantar fasciitis has been relatively under control lately) combined to make me completely forget my podiatrist's warning that flat shoes are not a good idea for me these days, and I got on the train in my new red Weitzman flats.

Well, I made it through a nice lunch in the café and two floors worth of galleries before I was nearly in tears. Oh sure, the front of my feet felt great, but my heel felt like someone was driving knives into it. I didn't think there was any way I could walk the rest of the day in those shoes, so I left MoMA and hurried a few blocks away to an Aerosoles store where I picked up a pair of these:

Aerosoles Flow Away

These are actually cuter on -- they have a great sort of retro, 40's, Andrews Sisters vibe to them. (I would also like to point out that I paid full-price for them in the store and they are now more than half-off on the website, but let's just. Not. Go there.) They were not ideal -- if the heels were maybe an inch lower they would have been more of what I needed, but at least they took the weight off my injured heel, which was what I needed.

Friday I stayed in Westchester & did local stuff, which meant the blessing of being driven around by Kelly and giving my feet a rest. So on Saturday when we got ready to go back into the city and spend the whole day poking around, I put the Ferragamo boots back on. Wiser for experience, I broke up my walking much more frequently with stops for lunch or coffee or wine and on the whole the feet were doing pretty well. We were in Chelsea headed toward the very nifty Hotel Gansevoort's rooftop bar (gorgeous views, sadly overpriced & mediocre wines) for a late-afternoon pick-us-up when I noticed that the sound of my heel on the cobblestones had changed. And sure enough, my heel tap (the little black plastic bit at the bottom of the heel itself) had mostly come off. I was walking on a bare nail protruding from the bottom of the heel.

Now, we all know how I feel about shoe maintenance. I spent the rest of the afternoon cringing in rhythm with my footfalls, knowing that I was damaging, possibly ruining, my beautiful boots with every step. (Without the heel taps your heels are coming into unprotected contact with the ground, which damages the leather and the structure of the shoe. It's very important to keep them up and replace them when they wear out.)

Monday was my last day in the city before flying back to Austin Tuesday morning and I was determined to make the best of it. It was a gorgeous day and I wanted to do a fair amount of walking around, and so I put on these:

Jeffrey Campbell Park

I like these shoes kinda middling-well. The good things about them are that they stay on my feet due to the ankle straps, they're a mid-heel and there is plenty of room in them to place an orthotic to help with the p.f. The bad things about them are that they're platforms (I tend to turn my ankle) and well... there's a bit of a Bride of Frankenstein vibe going on with them, honestly. They're not exactly elegant, but I had brought them just in case and the case was definitely presenting itself.

And ya know, it was great. Went into the city, strolled around, made my way downtown to Chambers St. to see what's going on with the re-building, made my way back up to Chelsea to have lunch with a friend. Feet felt good, I'd only twisted my ankle (not seriously) once, on the whole it was going swimmingly. I strolled east on 14th Street on a beautiful sunny New York day, planning to putz around in the Union Square area for a while before heading back up to mid-town & meeting my friend Mary for one last drink at Grand Central (there are some swell bars & restaurants in there, it's not just trains) before heading out.

And as I stepped off the curb to cross 14th Street, my shoe broke.

Yep. The loop that holds the ankle strap to the shoe snapped apart. This is not merely a cosmetic issue, friends -- these shoes have a fairly shallow footbed and without the ankle strap I can barely keep my foot in them -- I walk right out of them unless I go at a snail's pace.

Furious. Furious and frustrated and footsore and just completely out of my head. I stopped thinking rationally, hopped on the 4 train going uptown, and got off at Grand Central intending to march (well, not really march -- hobble) up to Saks and buy footwear because I was sick of being betrayed by cheap shoes!! (Or so went the silent rant in my head.) I came out of the station onto Vanderbilt Avenue and hadn't gone half a block when a neon sign jumped out at me: Shoe Repair!!

The clouds parted, the angels sang, I shuffled my way into a little hive of shoe-repair activity and sadly handed over my shoe to the distinguished Russian man named Alex behind the cash register, asking, "How long would it take for you to fix this?" He gave me the Russian no-problem shrug (if you have any Russian friends or relatives you know what I mean; if you don't, trust me when I say no one shrugs as eloquently as a middle-aged Russian man) and handed it off to a minion. Five minutes and $8 later, my shoe was returned to me. Ooooooh, so happy!!! For once -- it goes my way!!

I continued my wandering and found myself in Saks again (fancy that!), taking one last turn around the shoe department. I felt a little smug, congratulated myself on my $8 fix, and headed back out the door.

And the instant I stepped out the door onto Fifth Avenue, the other shoe broke.

No. I am really not making this up.

The furious haze descended again, I pivoted on my heel, went back inside, stormed upstairs (they have elevators, thank goodness) and bought the Weitzman flats in black. I wedged my little heel orthotics into them and wore them out of the store, heading straight back to Grand Central, where I staked out a rocking chair on the Campbell Apartment Terrace bar and nursed a couple of glasses of wine until Mary met me there.



This was not, perhaps, the wisest course of action for dealing with this, but at this point I was just... so... MAD!!!!

So here I am, back in the Land of Cars, and let me tell you -- when I wheeled my suitcase out into the parking lot at the airport & saw my car waiting patiently for me, I almost threw my arms around it and cried tears of joy. (Although, due to the amounts of grackle shit on the hood, this would be ill-advised.)

And believe it or not, I'm actually pondering returning the red YSLs. They were ex-pen-sive, and I bought three pairs of shoes I didn't expect to while I was in New York. I haven't even looked at any of my balances yet, but a trip to New York puts a dent in the ol' available credit line. And while they are exceptionally beautiful shoes, the truth is that they were substitutes for those Manolos. Which, as they are in stores now, may be sold out before I can get enough saved up again to score them, seeing as how I really need to focus on paying off this trip as opposed to buying more stuff. I know I'll wear the YSLs, and they feel nice -- the heel is only 3", which is extremely manageable. Oh, I don't know what to do. What should I do? Please tell me.

There were more New York adventures and there will be more regaling over the next week.


Photos: stock.xchng, Style Spy, Neiman Marcus, Zappos, shoebuy.com, Nordstrom