Thursday, December 26, 2013

Buy a pair of Christian Louboutin heals (or similar)

Buy a pair of Christian Louboutin heals (or similar)
November 3, 2013

I love shoes.  Especially expensive ones.  It's been my experience, that spending more than $100 on a pair of shoes is almost always a good thing.  The quality is there and they are so much more comfortable.  This is something that, believe it or not, my husband has taught me.

I also love the red bottom of Christian Louboutin shoes, but this wasn't the main draw to the designer when I made this list.  I did some research online and generally found that I liked Christian Louboutin shoes more than other high end designers.  They were more colorful and fun.  Yes, there is a time and place for great black shoes, but I already own those... and they're sparkly (yay, sparkles!).  I was looking for something really fantastic.

There's a store in Calgary that sells high end shoes - Holt Renfrew.  I went there in the summer for a quick look around.  I wasn't ready to buy at that time, but wanted to scope it out.

I was sorely disappointed at what they had in stock.  Yes, the shoes were beautiful, but they were almost entirely all black.  The ones that weren't black were nude.

So, I waited for a little while and did some thinking about this (more like day dreaming, really).  I didn't go in again, but figured that I could likely order specific shoes through Holt Renfrew or even direct from Christian Louboutin.  But this made me really nervous.  What if they didn't fit or weren't all that comfortable?  I planned on spending a lot of money and had to make sure that everything about the shoes I ended up with was perfect.

Online, they had a great pair of pink pumps.  They were beautiful!  In the middle of October, I started looking very seriously and found out that they were discontinued and couldn't be ordered.  Holt Renfrew would not be an option.  If they were found at a store anywhere else, that was my only shot.

Conveniently, my mom is a flight attendant and was in a city that had Christian Louboutin stores.  Even more conveniently, she and I share the same shoe size.  I asked her to go in and try them on.  If they fit, buy them.

She got to the store and they did have the shoes I wanted, but she wasn't impressed.  They were satin (which I didn't realize) and the heels were quite high.  She said they weren't comfortable at all.

I was crushed.  Back to the drawing board.

I did some more day dreaming and then did the next logical thing and went to Vegas to buy shoes.  YUP!
YUP!

On November 2nd, my beautiful moma and I flew to Las Vegas with the sole intention of buying beautifully high end shoes.

We got to the hotel and decided to go for lunch before starting the quest.  If you don't know, there's an amazing place in the Cosmopolitan called Secret Pizza.  Actually, I don't think it has a name, but that's what it is - secret pizza.  The 'restaurant' isn't advertised or shown on the floor plan of the hotel.  If you ask the employees where it is, they'll say that they don't know what you're talking about.  You have to know what you're doing to find it.  In my mom's travels, she heard about it and I went there when I was in Vegas in 2012, to find that it was amazing.  Since my mom had never been, she had no idea where it actually was and was excited to go to a restaurant that she'd only heard whispers about.

It did not disappoint.  I believe that the best way to start a shopping trip in Vegas is with a great slice of pizza and a gigantic cup of wine that was poured from a box (it's better than it sounds).

Afterwards we went straight to Caesar's Palace.  They have a Louboutin store as well as many other great high end shoe stores.  We went to Valentino, Jimmy Choo, Burburry, Fendi, Versace, Gucci & Louis Vuitton before going in to the Christian Louboutin store.  Even though I wanted Louboutins I was open to other shoes.  In hind sight, we probably should have gone there first, but I wanted to check everything out before making a final decision.

They had the pink shoes I'd been eyeing up, but my mom was right - they weren't comfortable at all.  I looked around the store, feeling a bit desperate to find something I would fall in love with, but it didn't happen.  Most of the shoes were satin and were very high.  I'm usually fine with higher heels, but at 5'9", it's just not that necessary for me.  Kitten heals are my preference.

One of the reasons I like to spend money on shoes is that I've found that shoes over $100 are usually way more comfortable.  With this reasoning, I figured shoes in the $600 - $1000 range would feel like buttah.  Boy, was I wrong!  Some of the ones I tried on made me want to take them off immediately.

We crossed the street and went over to the Venetian/Palazzo shopping mall.  They also have a Louboutin store, so I figured we'd try our luck there.  We faced the same issues.  Nothing stood out or was all that comfortable.

Well... that sucks.  But, at least now I could be more open to other shoes.

Jimmy Choo
We went to Jimmy Choo and found some incredible purple sequined shoes.  They were comfortable, not too tall and exactly the amount of fun I was looking for.  I walked around in them and a few others for a little while and got more and more excited.

Then I remembered something.  I have a beautiful long dress that I was planning to wear them with for the upcoming Christmas party and sequins would likely rip up the bottom of the dress.  The employee confirmed my suspicions, so I put them on hold and walked away.  

Tory Burch
It's too bad!  That would have been so nice to have found the perfect shoes so quickly after moving on from Louboutin.

So, we milled around and went into a few other high end stores at the Palazzo.  There were some extremely comfortable black shoes at Tory Burch, but they just didn't have it...

We went to the Wynn to see what they could offer.  There are some really incredible, high end stores in that mall.  We're talking about a mall that doesn't allow strollers.  I had a good feeling about this.

Oscar de la Renta
So, we went into Oscar de la Renta.  They don't have a lot of shoes, but what they do have are beautiful!  I found a gorgeous pair of blue kitten heals with gem embellishments.  There were only two downsides: they were satin - I was very worried about them getting ruined in the snow - and they were a few hundred (!) more than I wanted to spend.

So, we put them on hold and walked away...

Kate Spade
We checked out a few more great stores and then ended up across the street at the Fashion Show Mall.  They have a few department stores with high end shoes, so we had a look, but came up short there.  We did, however, find some beautiful silver shoes at Kate Spade... but I was still hesitant.

So, we decided to take a break and go for a quick supper and to see Cirque du Soleil's Love.  It's the second time I've seen it and it is incredible!  Seriously, if you're in Vegas, see this show. 

Prada
After the show we walked through the Bellagio and found that the shops were still open; it was around 11:30pm.  We went in to Prada and found some gorgeous print pumps.  They had a neat design and were pretty comfortable.

But, it was late, so we put them on hold and went back to the hotel to sleep on it.

It was a long day with a lot of walking, shopping and excitement.  I loved the options that I had put on hold, but none of them seemed like the right ones.  So I felt a bit discouraged.

Luckily, we were there during the daylight savings change over, which meant an extra hour in Vegas!  We got up the next morning feeling refreshed and ready to spend a bunch of money.

First, we went to my favorite brunch place.  It's not actually a brunch place, specifically, but I've only ever been there for brunch.  It's called Bouchon and it's in the Venetian, up in the suite towers.  Of course, I had a strawberry champagne cocktail!

Afterwards we walked around a bit and ended up at Aria which has another high end mall.   We went in to Gucci and then Fendi.  At Fendi they had some beautiful light blue pumps.  They were pretty comfortable and seemed like classics that would go with a lot of my clothes.

Again, they were put on hold, much to the chagrin of the sales assistant, and we continued on our treck, stopping in stores like Louis Vuitton, Prada & Tom Ford.

Then we went to Dolce & Gabbana and met Edgar.  This is where everything changed.  Edgar is the man every woman has dreamt of buying shoes from.  He had a nice Columbian accent and was very charming.

Edgar - I mean really, you can just see how amazing he is!

They didn't have many pairs of shoes, but there were a couple that sparked my interest.  One that I loved was black with jewels on the toe.  They had a few negatives though - they were satin and the heal was awkwardly low.  I mentioned to Edgar that I would love them if they were just slightly higher and to my surprise, he presented a higher version of the same shoe.  Now they were just a bit too high.

The moment I put them on, Edgar said, "Oh, look at her calves!  I love women's calves in high heals."  Seriously, he was perfect.

Dolce & Gabbana

They were beautiful.  Yes, they were black, satin and very high, but I fell in love.  The negatives were easy to look past when they made me feel so good.  And then it hit me - I had found my shoes!  And I became emotional.  I don't really know why, but the relief of finding them and the excitement of what they were just hit me.

And to top it all off, I was going to buy them from the most perfect shoe salesman ever.

I told Edgar that I would take them and I reconfirmed the price.  The rate I thought they were was just a bit higher than I was comfortable with, but I didn't mind.  At that point, Edgar realized that they were another $100 over what he had originally told me.  He had gotten them mixed up with the lower heal rate.

Another $100... on top of 'just a bit out of my comfortable budget'...

I was crushed.  I looked to my mom for an answer.  Should I stretch it even more?  We were running out of time.  What if there weren't any other shoes that made me feel that way?  What should I do?

And she knew what to say, of course.

I put them on hold and left the store with a heavy heart.

We sat on the bench in the mall and pondered what to do next.  Obviously I needed to keep looking.

At that point I realized that I was looking for something with an embellishment on the toe.  I don't know why I hadn't seen it before, but that's what really stood out about my two top favs (Oscar de la Renta and Dolce & Gabbana) so far.

I started to feel a bit anxious.  We had come all this way and were due at the airport in only a few hours.  What if I went home empty handed?

We decided to walk north again and ended up back at Caesar's Palace, where it all began.  The first time we were there, I was so sure I was going to buy Christian Louboutin's that I barely looked at anything else, so it made sense to give it a second look.

 We went through Fendi, Jimmy Choo and a few others pretty quickly and then ended up back at Gucci.  To me, service is hugely important and we had had bad service at a different Gucci store, so I didn't really give any of the others much thought.

This time I decided to look more closely and found a few beautiful pairs to try on.  The sales girl came over and grabbed the pairs I had requested.  She was no Edgar, but she was sweet and I liked her right away.

She brought out gorgeous purple shoes.  They were leather (check), had a platform so the heal didn't feel so high (check) and weren't simple black (check).  They were promising.

Gucci!

And then I put them on and they felt like buttah.  They were the most comfortable shoes I had put on that whole weekend.  It was incredible... but I couldn't get those Dolce shoes out of my head.

So, we stayed in Gucci for a little while.  I took the shoes off and put them back on again.  I walked all around and couldn't believe how great they felt.  The floor was all carpeted, so my sweet sales girl let me walk around in their store room to see how they would feel on the tiled floor.  They were amazing.

The longer I wore them, the more I loved them.  I was starting to think that these were my shoes.

Finally, I looked at my mom and said, "What do you think?".  I thought she might tell me to put them on hold, but she didn't.  She said she thought I should buy them.  She was right.  I should buy them.  They were incredible.  They felt so good and looked even better.  I was still a bit weary, because I didn't have that same emotional response as earlier.  Was I making the right choice?

I thought for a moment and then made the logical decision that I was.  They were everything I was looking for.  So I followed my sales girl up to the counter and handed her my credit card.  And that's when it happened.  I welled up and I felt even better than I had at Dolce & Gabbana.  These shoes were perfect and so was the experience I had just had!









She packed the shoes into a beautiful bag and tied a ribbon around the strap and handed them to me.  And I hugged her.

I was so relieved!  It felt so great to finally have exactly what I had been searching for. 

We had about an hour to bum around the Strip and then back to the airport.  It was a whirlwind weekend and it was so much fun!  My beautiful moma was the perfect shopping companion!

In the weeks that followed, I wore the shoes around my house a bunch of times, which freaked out the cats and I'm sure made the neighbors unhappy.  It was so tempting not to wear them to every outing I went on, but I had to wait.

Three weeks later was my husband's company Christmas party.  I had the perfect long dress and the shoes were just the icing on the cake.  We were standing on concrete the whole night.  Yes, my feet were sore by the end, but not nearly as bad as any other heals would have been.

It was like I had this little secret on my feet all night.  I fell in love with them even more.

We learned so much about shoes that weekend.  The most important being that I should have a driver to drop me at the front door everywhere I go.  That way I won't have to worry about whether my shoes are satin because they won't get mucked up in the snow.

That came up at more than one store... I'm not joking.



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