The Huffington Post, May 17, 2010

Ladies, it's time to wake up and smell the nail polish. The fashion industry is selling us shoes agonizing to walk in, excruciating to stand in, torturous from the moment we contort our arches until the evening is over and--hallelujah!--we can kick them off and slip on our grandma slippers. And what are we doing? We are buying them and wearing them! Have we lost our minds?

You should know that people working in fashion do not wear the outrageous shoes they design. Kate Mulleavy, the designer of Rodarte with her sister Laura, was aghast when a New Yorker reporter asked if she wore the six-inch heels she sends down the runway. "Are you kidding?" she said.

It seems to me that designers are testing us. They want to see how far they can go before we protest. At this very moment, they are all wearing athletic shoes and laughing uproariously. They can't believe we are stupid enough to wear their absurd contraptions!

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