Welcome to Is This Shoe OK?, an infrequent column about shoes that may or may not be good, as determined by Maria Sherman and me—authorities on the matter, because we own shoes—and you, in the comments below. In today’s installment, we’re looking at Bottega Veneta’s Snake Print Wraparound High-Heel Sandals, available as both a heeled sandal and a flat sandal.
When Kylie Jenner stepped out of her car in Bottega Veneta’s 2020 Resort sandals, replete with faux-snakeskin and a toe-ring, I got down on my knees and asked God—who I haven’t spoken to in a while—to wipe every last trace of them from the earth. He didn’t answer, of course, so now I’m left to sit with the memory of this sandal, haunting me with skinny straps and a tiny little kitten heel.
These shoes cost almost $1,700 dollars. That should obviously be illegal, but there is little I can do to stop the Bottega Veneta celebrity product endorsement machine, which probably blessed Kylie with this pair. Why else would anyone choose to step out in them? Obviously, being a Kardashian doesn’t necessitate a lot of walking. You maybe tread, at most, a few hundred feet between your Instagram selfie studio, “office,” and Kim’s frozen yogurt machine on a day-to-day basis.
It isn’t just the mechanics of these shoes that disgust me, although achieving even a few steps in them without a retinue of bodyguards seems nigh impossible. No, what truly bothers me about them is the toe ring, which in an alternate timeline, would be a crime worse than designing leather-look mini dresses. It assumes that all of Bottega’s clients (and paid celebrity spokespeople) have the same toe size, which surely cannot be true. Also, what about wide feet, which would definitely spill over the sides of these tiny little sandals? And that’s the other thing—they’re sandals! These are $1,700 sandals, which are things I could find just as stylish and just as cheap at TJ Maxx! (Ironically, that is where I intend to spend this afternoon in pursuit of some sandals I can trawl around in at my local deli at 11 p.m. in.)
Unfortunately, Daniel Lee’s Bottega Veneta is pretty widely regarded as the successor to Phoebe Philo’s Celiné, which is bonkers—but who am I to control the whims and fantasies of the fashion press? And so I leave the final decision to the Jezebel readers: Is this shoe okay? Please tell me I am right because I am right, and I am always right, and I love to be proven right. If you disagree, you are legally obligated, by the rules I just now invented, to write at least 5,000 words defending your point. Fight, fight, fight!