With the release of Sex and the City 2 just a week away, I’m sure I’m not the only one getting her knickers in a twist and planning an evening to watch the first movie with plenty of ice cream and swathes of fond reminiscence. Of course, it’s not just about the girls for me either – it’s at least half about the fashion and, of that half, the majority of my excitement is for the shoes!

Sex and the City famously adores the massive designer labels like Dolce & Gabbana, Prara and Dior, whose extreme gladiator platforms feature time and time again in the original movie. They also flaunt their love for designers like Jimmy Choo, Roberto Cavalli, Richard Tyler and of course Manolo Blahnik, who is reputed to have custom made Carrie’s blue satin heels especially for the movie! Between them and the massive costume department, which reputedly plans 50 outfits for Carrie in every episode, they rarely fail to utterly impress and astound my fashion addiction. Of course, jealousy also rears its ugly head at times, when I realise there’s no way I could afford even a single item of clothing on Carrie’s person, let alone the whole outfit or even the shoes alone. Although they often mix charity shop with designer labels, I don’t think there has ever been a cheap pair of shoes on that programme; the aforementioned Manolo Blahnik blue satins can be purchased for just shy of $1000!

Perhaps I should take blogging to the next level and become a journalist instead – Carrie never draws any real conclusions and she seems to get by alright!

The worst thing ever to happen has, sadly, happned. Somebody – who wasn’t me – has found and won Jimmy Choo’s Catchachoo shoes. Given that I may have invested more hours into finding those shoes than I have into anything in my entire life…I am gutted.

The evil one is called Tina Saul, who has apparently “ended up running after the Jimmy Choos, which was quite amusing.” Quite amusing?! That’s heartbreaking! I should have been the one running after the precious Choos…

For those who have been living in a cave, Jimmy Choo gave us all the chace to win some of his shoes for free; all we had to do was figure out where they were using Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, then race to the location at the same time as a rep from Jimmy Choos and say “I’ve been following you!”. Believe me when I say I wasn’t alone in my desire to win those trainers; hunrdeds, if not thousands of people have been avidly following Catchachoo and I expect we’re all equally peeved. Thanks Tina! Thanks for ruining our lives!

Image: insideretailing.com

“My my, what a high waist you have!” is probably not a cry many of us have heard before being swept off our feet, but perhaps all that is about to change.

Romanian “shoe architect” Mihai Albu has created some skyscraper-esque new sandals that make the wearer a whole foot taller!  Apparently he created these 12-inch heels in order to “reposition the waist” of women who “don’t have long legs”.  Now, I may not be a designer, but I’m fairly sure the disadvantages of wearing foot-high shoes encrusted with jewels, feathers and mirrors probably out-weigh the disadvantages of having short legs…

“If a woman is 5 foot 9, she’d be towering above everyone if she wore these” Albu said, summarising in one sentence why his are the worst shoes I may have ever seen.  However, for women who that damn paranoid about the length of their legs, there’s another obstacle to overcome (if your legs are long enough to step over it) – the price.  Probably because only the super-delusional will ever buy them, Albu has priced his ridiculous shoes at just over £1000 – over twice the average Romanian monthly salary!  If the dentistry out there is anything to go by, you can probably get a leg-extending operation for about that price!

Editor of FashionInsider.com magazine, Marcellous Jones, said of the shoes that “They are impractical, but there are women who are brave enough to wear them”.  I wonder how much they paid him; brave, Marcellous, or stupid?

Image thanks to the Telegraph.co.uk

I’m happy to admit I’m normally something of an internet addict, but the last few weeks of checking the net have left me exhausted! In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I wonder whether I should let you in on in…

A few weeks ago, designer shoe guru Jimmy Choo lauched Catchachoo – a puzzling race to find a free pair of Jimmy Choo shoes, hidden somewhere in London. By leaving clues and pictures of himself in the location on Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, Jimmy is stirring every shoe lover in the South East of England into a frenzy, including myself! All you have to do is figure out where the shoes are, get there at the right time and declare to the guardian “I have been following you…” and you win the shoes! Free Jimmy Choos! Short of writing “AAAAAAAAH”, there’s not much more I can do to get across how much of a big deal this is!

Jimmy has been quoted as saying “There have been some close shaves when people have missed the shoes by a minute or two.” It’s all getting a bit much for me; please excuse me as I sign off now and get back to checking! Good luck to everybody out there (I don’t mean that – they’re mine! MINE!)

Image belongs to Facebook.

A study into the shoe-buying habits of 2000 British women has discovered that 10% own more than 30 pairs of shoes and the ‘average’ woman owns 17 pairs! Although these figures seem quite high, they are actually lower than the results of a similar study into 1000 women released in December, which concluded that the average women has 19 pairs of shoes and that 17% owned more than 30 pairs. Perhaps it’s the recession that is to blame, but it seems we’re all wounded and bleeding shoes!

Fascinatingly, the average amount of money to spend on a pair of shoes was around £34. I must admit I was expecting more, but there must be enough sales of cheap footwear to bring down the sky-high prices that many people pay for their designer shoes.

70% of people questioned said they’d bought shoes that they have never worn, which is more understandable when compared to the 50% who said they had bought shoes on impulse. A surprisingly high 30% of women said they’d bought shoes just because they liked the colour, whilst a mere 16% said they had bought some shoes specially for a date seems a little low to me…I think some people we being coy…

Shoe lovers of the world…this is it. The greatest treasure-hunt ever know to mankind has begun! The legend that is Jimmy Choo is offering a FREE pair of his designer shoes to anybody who can hunt them down, using pictures and clues posted on social networkins sites! It’s like a late Easter Egg hunt, but with awesome trainers to find instead of lame chocolate!

The race is called Catchachoo and offers probably the only chance many of us mortals will ever have to possess some of Jimmy’s stunning pieces. These suede, leather and snakeskin low-top trainers are certainly not the kind of thing that should be used for racing around London, looking for…themselves. You know what I mean. The point is, I’m too excited to even type! I predict a painful week of internet addiction lies ahead…

UPDATE: In case you’re thinking you can cleverly predict where Jimmy is going to leave his shoes, here are some of the random places that have been found: The British Museum, Pizza East, Lounge Lover and The Hummingbird Bakery! For a better chance at finding them, try following @CatchAChoo now on Twitter, or search Facebook or Foursquare.

In an age of animals rights, it’s no surprise that designer shoes made of leather and wool have taken a rap in recent times. However, instead of the eco-friendly-shoe movement we predicted to arrive with the turn of the decade, we’re shocked to realise that plastic – yes, plastic – is very much coming back into style!

Causing more harm to the world and its population than just about everything else put together, the manufacture of plastic has returned to the world of designer shoes, where the infamous jelly shoe is making a resurgence. This time, however, there’s a whole lot more to them than you might expect.

Most things that come back into fashion end up being nothing like they used to be and the jelly shoe is no different. Various designers have got jelly-shoe fever, including the legendary Vivienne Westwood, and they have taken to moulding the classic footwear into all shapes and sizes – even stilettos! Of course, as is the case for all designer trends, there’s also the budget version – from Barratts for around £15.

Image from plastic-machine.org

Being born in 1914 to a family to Jewish farmers might not be the origin you’d expect for one of the greatest shoe designers of the 20th century, but that is exactly where the life of Beth Levine started, in New York City.

Now, nearly a century later, her life and work are brought back to the public eye in an exceptional new exhibition at the Bellevue Arts Museum. “Beth Levine: First Lady of Shoes” documents how Beth started out as a shoe model, gaining the experience necessary for her to design fashionable yet comfortable shoes, before opening a shoe factory with husband Herbert in 1950. In an industry dominated by men, Beth chose to design shoes under her husband’s name and soon revolutionised the world of designer shoes with her whimsical and experimental designs, as well as popularising new styles like stilettos, boots and mules.

First Lady of Shoes features adverts for and articles about her shoes, as well as drawings of her designs, photographs of both Beth and her famous clientele and, naturally, lots of designer shoes! Shoes on display include the space-age boots to celebrate the moon landing, the Butterfly Boot, her papers shoes and even the Marlene Boot, named after Marlene Dietrich.

Along with three First Ladies of the USA, Beth’s shoes have been worn by Marilyn Monroe, Geoffrey Beene and Cher, to name but a few. Seeing this exhibition is a must for all lovers of designer shoes.

INSA, a UK artist, has created some of the most bizarre shoes we’ve ever seen, as part of a new exhibit at the Tate Modern – a collection of responses to Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. What was controvertial about Ofili’s piece – that the Virgin Mary was made from elephant dung – is also what makes INSA’s shoes mentionable…they too are partly made of elephant dung.

I’d like to think the shoes are meant to represent something; perhaps the way in which the Western world’s fashionable culture requires people to put themselves at a distance from the poverty third world before splashing out thousands on clothes and shoes. I’d like to think the thick layers of dung that make up the bottoms of the shoes are representational of us walking all over the third world, having to use ever-greater heels to balance ourselves against the size of our oppression – although we look quite good, our ’soles’ are essentially crap.

Sadly, however, I think it’s probably just attention seeking nonsense, like most of what I see in the Tate Modern. Make it first, define it later – the poser’s guide to art. A press release claims INSA “sourced dung from the same family of elephants that produced the dung used in Chris’s infamous paintings” – as if that makes any difference whatsoever.

Malaysia Tourism Ambassador and world famous shoe designer Jimmy Choo has announced plans to open a college for shoe design in Malaysia before 2013. According to Choo, there is a deficiency of proper training for young shoemakers in the county, many of whom he believes are very talented. Shunning machine-made and mass produced designer shoes, Jimmy Choo values the craft of handmaking shoes, which he believes will help keep Malaysian shoemakers in the market; “When others are focusing on producing shoes with machines, man-made items will keep us competitive”.

Jimmy claims “Malaysian shoemakers are well known for their craftsmanship and this is the advantage we have over those in other countries”. Although we’d never doubt anything shoe-related that comes out of Jimmy Choo’s mouth, he was also backed up by Tourism Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ng Yen Yen, who clarified the size of the Malaysian shoe industry; explaining that in 2007 “tourists in Malaysia spent 20.8% of their shopping expenditure on shoes”