Chris Benz had easily his most striking show this week–made all the more so by the surreptitious heels he designed in collaboration with friend Alejandro Ingelmo. Having already done the shoes for the Cushnie et Ochs and Kimberly Ovitz shows, Ingelmo, for his freshman effort at Benz, delivered a solid eight color/print combinations across two silhouettes that incorporated Benz’s sweet, feminine and ladylike aesthetic–note the florals, which were backed–with his vertiginous, all-out sex appeal. “We’re two opposites,” he said at the presentation. “It’s his quirky side with my sexy design side.” Ingelmo, for anyone who isn’t familiar with his label (and as Shoe Snob readers you should be), doesn’t include fabrics, let alone florals, in his designs. But this collaboration, which took Ingelmo’s existing heels but infused his architecture with Benz’s sensibility, really hit a homerun. I love every single pair: the peep-toe oxford slingback stiletto and clog wedge woven leather bootie–all on a standard 140mm heel. “We created a longer silhouette on the clog to get the entire pattern on the shoe,” quipped Ingelmo. When the shoes arrive, they will bear the “Alejandro Ingelmo for Chris Benz” tag.
