I've been cobbling it all together since the beginning. Filling the gaps with whatever I could. Flipping and flopping in loss. Booted to despair. Pumped to near the climax of agony. I'm not trying to be existential, by the way. I'm a cobbler. A cobbler of high fashion women's shoes for the internet. That is to say, the shoes I make are utterly unwearable. At best they induce a stress position that slowly subjugates the will and the body of the wearer to the shoe. At worst they are fatal. I have seen my shoes used as implements of torture, weapons of war, even as scenery in snuff films. Slobodan Milošević once sent a very thoughtful missive thanking me for a particular pair of loafers about which he said (and I quote) "If these puppies had been around in Roman times, you could bet your keister they wouldn't have bothered crucifying anybody!" The thought of my footwear being used as the predominant method of capital punishment in any time period is enough to make me blush. But Roman times?! It would have made the Passion of Christ look like a glamorous runway show! Say what you will about old Slobodan, but he sure knows how to pay a girl a compliment.
Now cobbling treacherous fashion isn't all fun and games. My clientele (mostly psychotic, drug-addled fashionistas and murderous warlords) can, on occasion, make terrible board game partners. Just try telling the partly mutated, fanatic religious leader of a platform wearing paramilitary group that she has to pay for her second child's college fund in The Game of Life. I can't say for certain that things would turn out the same way they did for me, but in all likelihood she's going crash her 2003 leased station wagon right into the crotch of a nearby Canadian drug kingpin. Despite the clear and present danger I face everyday with clients, I still seem to eek out a good time. It's my employees that give me a real headache! No matter what it is, from testing my explosive, high couture landmine wingtips to guiding customers through my 10,000 strobe light flagship store, they always seem to find a way to complain. Human rights violations this, war crimes that. It's like a broken record, but that record is a spoken word version of Mein Kampf. In a fit of rage I once fired all of my employees and replaced them with a troupe of pulchritudinous pool boys. My business suffered immensely, but the erotic haze created by the smell of chlorine and the sight of the first ever Cabana Boy Con was well worth the monetary misstep.
When people ask me about how I come up with my perilous vogue, I laugh. As if inspiration were some routine like masturbating when your parents go take the dog for a walk. It comes to me in spurts. Sometimes I'm watching a movie and I think "Hey, this alien would look way more menacing in stilettos, but how on earth could I find a way to fit all fourteen of its toes in a pair?" Other times it's an overheard conversation. Why just the other day I was on a bus and heard this redneck couple being effusive toward their seven year old for trying to incite a race war at school. It occurred to me that they would look far more chic if they bound, perhaps even imprisoned. So I came up with a little straight jacket meets Teva sandals ensemble for them. Corsets have always been a muse to me and it is my firm belief that fashion is overly fixated on binding the gut and not so much other, eminently shackle-able parts of the body. What about the face, I always say. If I have one fashion prediction it is that in the next twenty years face corsets will replace white as our post labor day prohibition.
Footwear is more than just a career for me it's a philosophy. The funny thing is, though, I hate feet! In my design, I do as much as I can to punish them. And not like "slave" punish, more like righteous-vengeance-on-a-corrupt-cop punish. For me the gate to hell is a steaming, gaping Croc filled with the an eternity of lost soles. With all this more or less articulated in my mind I decided "this is going to be my life!" and I haven't looked back or down since.
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