I wonder if anybody noticed that shoes supposed to “serve as a commentary on today’s impossible standards of beauty.”
From reading the article, I got a feeling that designers didn’t do it for a money (it was a grad thesis project), or for the art sake but to vent frustration of the designer on a fashion industry, which makes normal people feel inadequate because they can’t or don’t wish to conform to standards of fashion/beauty, which are often either too high or too absurd or both. In that role I’m finding those shoes actually to be perfect. A lot of normal people, among which are impressionable teenage girls, will feel inadequate even if they are perfectly normal/healthy/beautiful in non-mainstream way, even in case if standards of fashion/beauty may become something like that sort of harmful, absurd way of walking; some will mutilate themselves just to be “beautiful” but even on those who won’t it may leave a serious impression that they are, in some way, “ugly”
That this design got an award is either deeply ironic (to give a fashion reward to the design that is, basically, anti-fashion) or deeply disturbing (as it was nothing more creative to award). The fact that “The jury applauds the way aesthetics, ergonomics and prosthesis merge into an awkward choreography” looks for me like either they completely missed the point the author was trying to make, or they deliberately ignored it.
