This is a men's ankle boot by Zaha Hadid for Lacoste Footwear.
Look in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times and you’ll find an article entitled The Reincarnation of the Jelly Shoe, With a Designer Flair. Aside from the fact that this trend piece feels months too late (come on, it’s almost fall), it also inadvertently becomes one of the best arguments against wearing jelly shoes that we’ve read to date (excluding our own piece on Benjamin Button fashion, of course.) After the jump, five reasons why we’ll never look at PVC footwear the same way again.
1. Because of Crocs these molded plastic shoes are now widely accepted footwear, which makes it O.K. for designers to come out with their own styles. “Because of Crocs…” No sentence should ever begin with those three words.
2. The advancements in plastics and similar materials during the past 20 years have made it possible not only to mold a shoe to the foot, but to make shoes odor-resistant or perfume-scented. A plastic shoe that smells like bubblegum and molds to our feet. Lovely.
3. They are also better able to handle friction and sweat, which were a problem in the plastic shoes of the past. Again with the sweating!
4. The shoes are relatively low-priced for a designer item, with most pairs costing less than $200. Or: This is the equivalent of buying a Louis Vuitton keychain.
5. The Crocs brand, seeing a saturation point for its summer clogs, has already started to expand its offerings with brightly colored clogs and boots topped off with a soft ‘fuzz’ lining for winter. Now you can be aesthetically offensive regardless of the season. Also: we’re wondering what said “fuzz” is made of.
[via NYT]