friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear manolo blahnik,

why are your shoes so boring and/or ugly? i think you've played a mean trick on the wealthy and fashion-obsessed women of the world. see, i've figured out that "manolo blahnik" is actually an anagram for "loon makin' blah," which is obviously exactly what you are. how you managed to become globally revered for it i'll never know, but then i probably wouldn't have run away from home to live in andy warhol's factory, either. perhaps i am simply missing some sort of artistic irony in your cobbling. is there a message? shoes are generally designed to provide one or both of two things: comfort and attractive design. your shoes provide neither, and so from my point of view they are failures. yet for years now they have been the platonic ideal against which all other pumps are measured; why should this be? all i can think of is that they are not shoes but art, which is allowed to be unbearably ugly if it embodies meaning or inspires a visceral reaction, even a negative one, and i have been misunderstanding your aims all of this time. even if that is the case, though, i think i'm likely still correct in saying women are crazy to spend the kind of money you're charging on things that look like that only to put them on their feet and limp smilingly down a dirty street in them. but then, only an artist can speak to the purpose of his own art.

so speak. explain yourself. tell me what a thousand-plus-dollar ankle boot covered in black lace and adorned with a ring of the sort of tassels normally reserved for heavy drapery really means. i will hear you out to the end, i promise. but if you refuse to justify your actions, i will be forced to conclude that you have been off in a villa someplace laughing yourself to tears at the hopeless sheepliness of females everywhere--and probably, even though what you are doing is a little mean, i will laugh right alongside you.

i am not yet certain enough of your position to assign any sort of emotion to this closing,

juniper