Let’s Get Some Shoes (Yet More Ways to Pick Those Wedding Colors)
Then, after you've gotten over the initial "shoes!" buzz and managed to walk past those bejeweled strappy sandals with your first, middle, last and even secret stage name written all over them, start knuckling down to the really important thing — the boxes.
Because style houses, like you, have agonizing decisions to make when it comes to packaging all those beautiful shoes. They have to convey everything that's fabulous about their brand in two colors. (Sometimes less, occasionally more.) This is a cruel fate roughly equivalent to what Hamlet went through on his summer vacation and you're about to go through in your efforts to throw a $30,000 party.
One thing you'll notice about labels aimed at we capital-W women is that the colors are pretty clean. It's not that they don't have girl power, but on the whole, they're not the type of colors that would put your fiancé in mind of that junior prom in which his gap-tooth girlfriend begged him to wear a Peep-yellow cummerbund. No, these are colors that any hip couple could run with and not flirt with trauma (not now or 20 years later, when you show the snaps to the kids).
For example, let's look at Liz Claiborne and Kenneth Cole. Wheat and charcoal: an urban palette that goes down easier than a strawberry cosmo (and it's oh-so-2008). We love Kenneth Cole's especially, all punched up with chartreuse.
Or Aerosole's marriage of magenta and tangerine. These types of pairings, once considered clashing but now just considered really outgoing, like your friend Karen who likes to short tech stocks and fly mini-jets on weekends, are showing up at plenty of indie-style bashes that feature exotic cake flavors, layered linens and coppery accents.
Bandolino reminds us that no matter how many times it's been done, chocolate brown and pink are really, really cute.
LifeStriders points out that apple green doesn't just go with coral, it hooks up with the season's aqua just as well, thank you very much. And let's bless the powers that be for Kelly & Katie, who remind us that the crisp contrasts of Tiffany Blue with black is horribly underrated.
Browse a bit more, and you're likely to see some more creative swirls of fuchsia and orange (Mudd, Boutique). And let's not forget the simple beauty of monochromatics: Madeline's swiss dots on a wash of mint, or Soft Style's sophisticated palette of blue on blue.
Of course, by this time your unsupervised fiancé has probably settled on two pairs of faux alligator mountain clogs and you'll have more pressing matters to worry about.
More reasons to shoe shop! Very cool idea!
