“Craziness in a shoe is great… you can exaggerate and it doesn’t feel stupid. But to have too much craziness near your face, that would just feel weird.” – Miuccia Prada
We can’t get enough of shoes. In the past 30 years, the number of pairs an average woman owns has doubled. Designer trainers sell for thousands of dollars and high heels take on ever more extreme silhouettes. Shoe design is where craftsmanship and imagination go wild.

This book offers a great introduction to one of the most fun and creative extremities of the fashion industry. It looks at footwear through history; breaks down classic shoe construction; explores the evolution of the high heel and charts the rise and rise of trainers. It showcases some of the weirdest and most wonderful shoes throughout, including 17th-century Crakows, which were so long and pointy, they had to be tied to the wearer’s knees so they wouldn’t trip over, Alexander McQueen’s Armadillo Shoe, and the Gillie heels by Westwood, which nearly broke Naomi Campbell’s leg on the catwalk!

Quirky collage illustrations by Laura Winstone bring the lively, engaging text to life, making this a must-have for fashion and footwear fetishists young and old.