Something asymmetrical is afoot in European shoe wear
A new fashion trend is making great strides in Europe: wearing two completely different shoes.
Style experts say wearing mismatched shoes, something cutting edge shoe designers have experimented with for at least two decades, is entering the mainstream.
A new Italian tourist brochure, for example, features fashionistas in Rome wearing a red suede mule and a green patent pump, and a boot and a dress shoe in matching brocade.
"What rule says the right has to be the same as the left shoe?" asks Dalia Saliamonas, the marketing director of Spanish shoemaker Camper. "It's a game: Each pair, each side can have its own personality like a couple in a marriage."
One of the label's creations features a map split across two shoes, with one shoe showing an arrow marked "estoy aqui" (I am here). Another pair has a properly laced shoe, while the other has laces askew.
In fact, the non-matching pairs constitute a line in themselves -- Twins. The series has not only sold better and better but become more and more avant-garde in look, the company says. The trend isn't just catching on in Italy, a country that takes its shoes more seriously than most. According to Paloma Marugan, director of the consumer product department of Spain's trade commission, asymmetrical pairs have been popular in the country's youth market for a while.
Marugan thinks consumers are drawn to asymmetry for the imperfection it mirrors in themselves.
"I think this is a very refreshing idea that has been very successful in Europe because it somehow took us all away from a very 'uniform' world and into a more human one that reminds us all that we human beings are not exactly symmetrical, and that honoring that is healthy and fun."
Meanwhile, at prices directed more at grown-ups than the youth market, artist Mihara Yasuhiro has done a series featuring two completely different shoes for Converse. Famously conservative Stubbs & Wootton -- a favorite label of the golf and yacht club set -- offers loafers with different tops for the right and the left.
According to Commedes Garcons, themselves experts in mixing it up, designers have a natural affinity for asymmetry. A representative for Dover Street Market, Rei Kawakubo's London store, says the look is rampant among all lines stocked: "This season, all is a mix. Trousers with skirts, dresses with suit jackets, and so forth."
