A little extra on mine and Thomas' big fashion day out yesterday, we went to go see the Vivienne Westwood shoe exhibiton that is on at Selfridges in London at the moment. It was really interesting to see the shoes in a time line and also how influential Westwood's shoes really are. I mean we can all go on about her Pirate boots that are worn and loved by many celebs as well as those infamous platforms in which Naomi Campbell took a tumble whilst wearing and the Melissa collaboration, but there were things that I noticed that she had done which designers more relevant to footwear are doing now.
The first shoe I noticed was her winged high heels which is referenced from the greek god Hermes and his winged sandals, now the more recent and more recognisable interpretation with some people is Jeremy Scott's winged trainers for his collaboration with Adidas.
Shoe collage made by me from my own pictures of the Vivienne Westwood shoes and picture of Jeremy Scott trainer from Hypebeast.com
There are also cultural references being the wooden platform shoes that are normally worn by Japanese Lolita.
Photo on the left my own from the exhibition, the one on the right from ebay.
Here I have put together a slide show of pictures I took of the shoes that were in the exhibition.
One thing I noticed was that Vivienne westwood is very decedent and flamboyant with her footwear, there's a lot of prints and decoration going on with them. This is something that I feel has only really started to be picked up on with designers examples like Alexander McQueen designing his infamous Armadillo shoes as well as the feathered shoes featured in the A/W 2010 presentation, and shoe designers like Nicholas Kirkwood creating shoes that look like something out of a storybook.
