Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Most Bizarre Shoes of 2012

Getting a shoe design right is quite simple – elegance and sophistication win time and again over brash and showy. The best dressed people in Hollywood will always plump for simple over bold. George Clooney is a great example of this; widely considered the best dressed man in Tinseltown, Clooney rarely wears something more extravagant than a pair of Oxford style lace-ups. Yet for every Clooney there are dozens of fashionistas and celebrities who will want to draw attention to them selves with outlandish and bizarre footwear designs.




No celebrity actually got the chance to try on one of the most bizarre shoe designs of recent years as it was pulled before it could be release due to widespread anger. Adidas teamed up with designer Jeremy Scott to produce a pair of garish trainers which featured the unusual addition of in-built shackles. The trainers, whose shackles rendered them useless on a practical sporting level, were a cruel reminder of slavery and were described as a “human degradation” by Jesse Jackson. If the design was supposed to be ugly, offensive and impractical then it succeeded.


Gimmicked heels have become one of the most popular and bizarre choices for attention seeking celebrities this year. Taylor Momsen kicked off the trend with shoes that boasted heels shaped like pistols and straps like bullet holders – the six inch heels were balanced by a four inch platform to make the shoes doubly ugly.


Jodie Marsh, the UK bodybuilder, has really taken to gimmick shoes with much enthusiasm as of late and has even employed Milly J to be her shoe designer. Her two most notorious and infamous designs have been displayed on British TV to an instant critical drubbing. The first, teapot shoes, uniquely boasted both spouts, pertruding from the front of a shoe in an archaic Persian-esque fashion, and handles on the behind. The second pair were described by the designer herself as “satanic”. Featuring feathers and a crucifix, the heels’ piece de resistance was the inclusion of real life taxidermied and preserved crow’s feer. Only Fergie, the lead singer of the Black Eyed Peas, has this year come close to rivaling these shoes in the crazy stakes with her green flame motif heels she wore for Saint Patrick’s Day.


Some celebrities have decided to abandon the heel altogether. By this, I am not referring to sporting ballet pumps or sensible flats, but rather high heeled shoes with the heel missing from the design. Boasting the high angled design of a typical pair of stilettoes, but with none of the support for the heels, celebrities including Lucy Liu have tried to embrace the trend to the bafflement of onlookers. Will Smith’s daughter Willow has tried taking this design one step too far with a similarly shaped pair of footwear – the twist being that the shoes locked into the high angled shape look more like cheap trainers than traditional heels. This design means that it fails to feature the benefits of the two shoe types it is a hybrid of – it boasts none of the pleasing aesthetics of a high heel not the practical, sporting attributes of trainers.


One of the most bizarre choices for shoes came this year from Kim Kardashian. Whilst the shoes themselves were rather ugly, the real reason they can be seen as odd is that, like the Adidas shackles, these shoes were always like to offend a large number of people. Having had a number of run-ins with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Kardashian took to wearing a thigh high pair of snakeskin Christian Louboutin boots which were either a calculated attempt at baiting or incredibly naive. Bizarre either way.



Author Bio

Kieron Casey is a fashion blogger and writer who is always flummoxed by the latest trends in heels and women’s footwear. He writes on behalf of Barratts Shoes.

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