Reasonably Presentable

This one’s a reader request, and one I’ve felt a little impostor-syndrome about!  Everyone wants to find comfortable heels, and I hate heels.  However, I am a good researcher, I appreciate how heels look on other people, and I am all about harm mitigation, so I decided to find out:

1. What shoe brands promise reasonably comfortable, yet attractive, heels?
2. Do any of them actually have data, rather than anecdotes, to prove their points?

I know that a lot of recommendations I make are not cheap, but there’s no area of fashion I’ve explored that can command prices as absurd as “comfortable, pretty high heels”– especially shoes with any kind of data to back up their promises of comfort. That said, here’s what I’ve found on brands that make nice-looking high heels that are designed to hurt minimally.

L’Amour Des Pieds is a fairly new comfort brand created by Wayne Finkelstein, who is also the dude who started Gentle Souls before Kenneth Cole took over.  That meant I was willing to give their shoes a try even though they don’t make wide widths: Gentle Souls (under Kenneth Cole) is one of the only brands that makes pretty-ish shoes with a toebox wide enough for me.  So I picked up a pair of L’Amour Des Pieds’s Darron sandals in mustard.

Man, am I profoundly torn:

• They’re way more interestingly-designed than most comfort shoes.  They also come in fun colors, which may not mean a lot to most people, but I have been trying to find a pair of yellow or green shoes that I can actually wear for *literally years*.  Add ‘wide’ to your search and all your unusual color options disappear.
• They were extremely comfortable right out of the box– they’re smooth on the inside, have a comfortable amount of arch support, and have enough padding that bumpy roads don’t hurt my feet.

The problem: I’ve been wearing these sandals about every other day for two months, and they’re already showing signs of falling apart.  Pictures below the fold, so you can see what I mean.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about footwear (mostly because the posts I want to write are either historical research projects or would involve me going to the store to try on shoes I don’t usually wear).  So here’s a popular question I’ve gotten:

How do you find shoes that are wider in the toe but narrower in the heel that also don’t look like clown shoes?

The fact that this is requires a search is ridiculous.  According to the podiatrists I’ve spoken to, most women have wider forefeet and narrower heels.  But women’s shoes are usually built either to have toes that are the same width as their heels or toes that are narrower.  This is especially frustrating to me as someone with a significantly-wider-than-average forefoot but narrow heels, and it’s also frustrating because shoes that are too narrow in the forefoot cause bunions… which are extra-painful if you are wearing shoes that are narrow in the toebox.  But you can find them, and I hope this post makes that process easier for you!