Why Do I Want These $600 Yeezy Stripper Shoes So Badly?
When Kim Kardashian posted a video of herself (who else?) in Yeezy Season 2 Lucite heels last week, I came face to face with a confusing fact: I’m into clear shoes now. Six hundred dollar clear shoes, at that.
Actually, technically, I’m into clear shoes again. I will never forget the Lucite-heeled mules I wore to prom my sophomore year of high school. They were from Deb, the New Jersey mall store to end all New Jersey mall stores, a predecessor of Forever 21 where the clothes were itchy, brightly colored, and just as skanky as they wanted to be.
The year was 2004, my prom dress was hot fuchsia, and my skin was bright orange. And like my other mid-2000s peers, I had a dilemma: what color shoes would match my neon prom dress? Clear ones, obviously.
The benefits of clear shoes are twofold. For one thing, they match pretty much everything. And even more crucially, since they’re clear, they give your legs this incredible Barbie effect — your calves are tighter, your toes are pointed, and there’s a clean line from your toes all the way up to your hemline, making your legs look slimmer and longer than you ever thought possible.
This is also probably why clear heels quickly became the preferred shoe of another demographic besides mid-2000s teens: strippers.
After clear shoes stopped being trendy around 2006, they became derisively known as “stripper shoes.” My friends and I cringed at our clear-heel-loving teenaged selves ever since, thinking the lucite heels we all wore to prom were hopelessly tacky.
But it’s 2016 now, and I find it way more unfortunate that I used to scoff at “stripper shoes” than the fact that I once wore them.
Nowadays, a new, sex-positive feminism has taken hold. A side effect of selfie culture is that women as a whole might be a little less ashamed of our sexuality, nude selfies and all, than we were 10 years ago. We’re more comfortable wielding our sexuality and our bodies as tools we control, so emulating stripper style is not such a bad thing. In fact, a lot of people now consider it empowering.
Hopefully pop culture’s current wave of sex-positivity isn’t just another trend that will vanish along with Lucite heels when they, too, inevitably go out of fashion again. But in the meantime, I’ll be unashamedly obsessing over Yeezy Season 2’s $595 perfectly-pointy-toed lucite heels, which just became available online.
