I only know what the words Manolo and Blahnik mean, not because I watch Sex and the City, but because I have written speeches for people who do.  If that TV show and recent movie have done anything for Western Civilization, it’s boost the economy by moving boxes of shoes like barrels of oil.  These are shoes for girls, though.  Not boys.

In Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, one character – a Brit - has a condescending line about the shoes Americans wear, particularly American men.  I forget the exact line, but the man says something about how American men know how to ruin a good dress shoe by making it clunky and heavy, like some kind of boot.  Wolfe knows about shoes.  I’m sure his are all handmade on Saville Row, or on some centuries-old foot last somewhere in Northern Italy.  

And so, if you’d like to know what real men’s dress shoes look like, and if you’d like to see if you, too, are a victim of the thick Americanization of footwear, take a look at this slideshow and this essay about the best men’s footwear from Forbes.  If you wear a suit and a tie for a living, it might help to see how your shoes fare.  Mine, I thought, were nice.  After reading about these, I see that they are not.