Evening Shoes for Day by Lynn Yaeger

Our third post in a new three-part series, dubbed New Ways to Glamorize Your Spring Wardrobe, explores evening shoes for day.
“The notion that a shoe intended for evening can’t be worn during the day is absurd. It depends on how you style it! Even rhinestones, satin, and velvet can be paired with a simple shirt, or jeans. You have to have the guts to wear what you want!” says Paola Bay, designer for Zoraide shoes, who is a leading proponent of day-for-night footwear—by which we mean the stylish propensity to go about one’s daily routine shod in towering pumps and peeptoes formerly relegated to evening soirees.
This delicious development first reared its lovely head during the fall collections, when women like Giovanni Battaglia could be spotted sporting insanely delicate shoes in broad daylight. It’s a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the 1990s, when legendary dressers like Isabella Blow were famous for arriving at work in the early morning (well, maybe not that early) in paste-buckled brocade slippers.

In the intervening decades, we’ve been strapping ourselves into chunky, clunky gladiators and teetering on spiked platforms meant to evoke a rough-and-ready, almost sadomasochistic sexiness. With years of that behind us, is it is any wonder women are ready to try a little tenderness, at least where their feet are concerned?

Bay, for one, has recently been spotted trotting around Milan, her hometown, wearing rhinestone-encrusted pink velvet heels paired with dungarees, a decision, she admits, calculated “to drive the old-fashioned Milanese nuts! Some people still feel they have to match,” Bay observes with the faintest snort of ladylike derision. “But if you wear evening shoes during the day, you feel elegant, even more confident! You have a different body language.” Bay argues that younger women, born in the 1980s and ’90s, grew up without any of the hidebound rules regarding how to dress that hemmed in their mothers, and they are the early adopters of the evening-shoes-for-day trend. “In the old days you only got to wear these shoes five or six times a year. Now young women want to wear them all the time.”

Her feelings are more than seconded by Charlotte Olympia Dellal, another shoe designer who practices what she preaches. “Ever since I started making shoes, that’s been my aesthetic. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to design shoes in the first place!” Dellal says, adding that her creations are meant to evoke a bygone era, “when things were more fun. People dressed with a bit more character back then—there were more excesses in hats, shoes, and bags.” Dellal thinks that the increasing availability of shoes in brilliant colors and prints, at both designer and high street levels, is fueling the movement. “When I was growing up, all you could get was black, and maybe red—that was the idea of a crazy color,” she remembers with a slight shudder. “Now that there’s so much choice, it’s easier to experiment. People can really show their personality. When you look down, I think fun shoes are a nice surprise.”

Tabitha Simmons, whose eponymous line offers such extravagances as the Dixie shoe—a gray glitter toe–python body hybrid with a super-high chunky heel she avidly argues is meant for both 11:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m.—frequently dresses from the ground up. “I start at the feet and take it from there,” she explains—which, in her case, can mean beginning with sequined platforms and terminating abruptly in ripped jeans and a tee. “People buy shoes as an investment,” she sums up, “and they are going to wear them whenever they want to!”