Nicolette Mason is a freelance fashion writer/editor and an authority on plus-size fashion. You may have seen her work on Refinery29, as well as in Marie Claire and Brooklyn Magazine. She also operates her own blog where she shares her personal style and fashion point of view.
For as long as I can remember, shoes have been my fashion safety zone; even if I couldn’t get my hands (or my waistline) on the clothes that I coveted, I could usually rely on slipping my toes into a show-stopping heel. Equal parts growing up in school uniforms where only my feet were free reign, and always being a “bigger girl,” shoes are accessible, almost democratic, and have a completely transformative effect that makes you stand taller (sometimes literally), walk stronger, and feel more confident — or at least, this is the effect a fantastic pair can have on me.
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Last spring, as I watched the Miu Miu livestream of their fall '11 show, there was one, and only one, thing I could think about: the completely mesmerizing, unsurpassably sparkling, glittering curved heels and booties. I was hardly the only one immediately obsessing over these shoes, and I’m sure that for months I tortured my friends with incessant mania — long emails waxing poetic about my absolute need for these shoes and 140-character theses on the Miu Miu glitter bootie as my spirit animal! My need was almost compulsive. Until, of course, the shoes finally became available, every A-list editor at the spring '12 shows was Tommy Ton-ed while wearing a pair, and the price of — gasp — $890 finally set in for this young fashion writer.
As fate would have it, the shoes ultimately ended up in my closet (and on sale, to boot!) — and, at last, a gold, glittering curved heel and a pink-and-silver bootie were mine. I paraded around my apartment, convinced myself that they were, in fact, comfortable, Instagrammed the hell out of them, and wore them to every event I could reasonably justify — even brunch!
Was I becoming a fashion victim?! Something that was so of-the-moment was in heavy rotation in my wardrobe. Even Shit Fashion Girls Say called me out — “She’s still wearing the Miu Miu glitter bootie...”
It got me thinking about the life span of my most coveted sartorial investments. Is “last season” still a thing? In a climate of high-and-low, fast fashion, investment buying, and, dare I say, global warming, does fashion still have a moment where it’s in-one-season, out-the-next? I’d like to think our trends are less pervasive than that, but either way, I’ll be damned if you can knock the smile off my face when I walk out the door in my so-last-season sparklers.