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Why, why, why is the stiletto still queen? Why do young women, even women who are soon to graduate from university, subject themselves to the contemporary version of foot binding even while there are perfectly acceptable sexual display vehicles like martini-heeled mules to wear?
And why do some 20-year-old women like Magdalena, and her running mate at the Biviano show, Maree (wearing a pair of staggeringly beautiful Dolce Gabbana leopard print stilettos, utterly impractical, but which could adorn any museum as art), both be willing to cop flak at university for being glamour babes amid the unofficial conformity of campus life?
Because Magdalena and Maree know there are two kinds of people in the world - shoe people and pedestrians. We've said it before and we'll say it again: they know that every pair of shoes is a short story, that shoes provide a wealth of forensic detail about people, and that charismatic shoes provide collateral charisma. So why compromise?
Magdalena's green crocodile needles and Maree's arched leopards exuded charisma, which transferred to the wearer. Magdalena's shoes also have an inner sole that is charcoal grey covered with polka dots. ''Nobody can see the soles but I know they are there," she says.
All perfectly understandable to Shoe People, and absurd to Pedestrians. But these are not Sex And The City drones. Sarah Jessica Parker may have exercised influence over a generation of young women but she has quickly become a dated caricature of herself. ''Sarah Jessica is embarrassing now," said Magdalena. ''She's beyond passe. She's not even last season. The women in that show are shallow gold-diggers, social climbers and pretenders."
(Speaking of Over, there is the Fertility Look still dominant in Australia - the low-low, bare-belly hipster look. A fashion writer who flew out from Paris for Fashion Week, Carine Bizete of Le Figaro , told me she was shocked by how low Australian women will go. In France, where the bare midriff was unveiled as a fashion statement at the 1994 Paris collections, the look is as passe as Sarah Jessica Parker.)
The photographer Alex Zotos, who has been covering the Paris fashion shows for 15 years and who brings a thoughtful perspective to the fashion zoo, loved the Biviano spectacle. ''It was like the old days, before the magic went out of the shows and it all became a commercial and hard-nose. You don't see much that's romantic these days."
If Fashion Week finished well it also started well, with Leona Edmiston, back after an absence of five sometimes turbulent years. How can someone so sweet attract so much lightning? Edmiston is the closest thing Australia has to Audrey Hepburn, and she makes elegant clothes that women, not just young women, can actually take straight off the catwalk and into the real world. When Leona led her models out at the end of the show, she wore a simple dress and a pair of low black elastic-sided riding boots that she bought years ago from Freelance in Paris and which will never go out of style. Shoes never lie.
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