The Kucz Thinks You Spend Too Much On Shoes
Christmas, New Years, whatever — today marks a much more important holiday: the return of the highlight of our week, the Times' Critical Shopper column. And Beauty Junkie Alex Kuczynski is back from her vacation in fine form, regaling us with tales of a sherry-soaked, churro-glutted undergraduate sojourn in Spain, and explaining to us that though featured shop T Casan's owners say that its name "comes from the Gaelic phrase for 'a woman's path,'" she refuses to accept that meaning because "that sounds like a self-help book for women going through menopause, so I prefer the Spanish translation. If you don't count the accent on the first word, it translates as "they marry you," and frankly I felt married to at least two pairs of the shoes by the time I left." Oh, Kucz, never leave us again!
But she wouldn't be the straight-lady-Bob Morris we know and love if she didn't get into chidey mode at some point in her column; that point comes when she talks about T Casan's ($210-$425) prices, which strike her as quite reasonable, in contrast to the diabolically expensive footwear she usually purchases:
I think $400 to $850 is a lot to spend on a pair of shoes, but in recent years well-to-do American women have been suckered into a bewildering fashion conspiracy.
To anyone who looks at Vogue or W, it would appear that in order to be fashionable, to be stylish — to be, in fact, footwear — shoes must cost $700. There is something dark about this, as if we have become Stepford Wives, marching off to the high-end shoe brands as if our brains had been sucked out of our skulls and replaced with slots for charge cards. Ka-ching.
You know, if you look really closely at that picture, we think you may even be able to spot the slot. Ka-ching!
