Armadillo shoe
American singer Lady Gaga famously wore the shoes in several public appearances, including the music video for her 2009 single "Bad Romance".
[4][5] For his Spring/Summer 2010 collection, Plato's Atlantis, McQueen took inspiration from climate change and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, envisioning a world where humans evolved to survive underwater after global flooding.
[7][6][8] The show's final outfit, entitled "Neptune's Daughter", was covered entirely in enormous blue-green opalescent sequins, including the matching armadillo shoes.
[13][14] The vertical body of the shoe is shaped in a convex curve, which has been compared to the silhouette of an armadillo, lobster claw, or animal hoof.
[17][18] The shoe hides the entire foot from ankle to toe, creating the illusion that the wearer is walking en pointe in the manner of a ballerina.
[19][20] In actuality the ball of the foot rests at an angle on a concealed platform, with a small bulge above the toe to facilitate lifting the heavy shoe to walk.
[11][22][23] McQueen sketched the initial idea for the shoes in early 2009, taking inspiration from the work of pop artist Allen Jones and fashion designer Leigh Bowery.
[23] The Daily Beast reported that the complex manufacturing process "spanned five days and involved 30 people, using material from three suppliers and passing through three factories".
[27] The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City owns two pairs, one made from turquoise shagreen and another in black leather with metal accents.
"[28] In the end, models Abbey Lee Kershaw, Natasha Poly and Sasha Pivovarova all declined to walk in Plato's Atlantis because of their concerns that the heels were too high to be safe.
[38][39] American singer Lady Gaga, who became a friend of McQueen's shortly before his suicide, premiered her 2009 single "Bad Romance" at the Plato's Atlantis show.
For the single's music video, released November 2009, Gaga wore the opalescent "Neptune's Daughter" outfit that closed the Plato's Atlantis show, including the matching armadillo shoes.
[40][41] Gaga wore a pair of armadillo heels in python skin when she arrived at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2010; she described this look in 2018 as the top outfit of her career.
[44] Three brand-new pairs were created in 2015 by McQueen's label in partnership with Christie's auction house, which sold them to raise money for the UNICEF 2015 Nepal earthquake relief fund.
[49] Later that year, in an article that celebrated deliberately unappealing fashion, The Paris Review called them "aggressively ugly" while noting that they had "forever change[d] footwear.
[61][62][63] For the 2022 exhibition Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse, first shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, designer Michael Schmidt was commissioned to make several replica pairs from various materials, including candy wrappers, broken CDs, and Swarovski crystals.
[15] Writing for The New York Times in 2009, Amanda Fortini connected their immense height to the so-called hemline theory, which posits that fashion designs tend to reflect the state of the economy.
[33] Fashion historians Beth Dincuff Charleston and Francesca Granata have each argued, in 2010 and 2017 respectively, that the shoes function closer to medical or corrective devices than footwear.
[20] Philosopher Gwenda-Lin Grewal called them an example of surrealist high comedy in fashion, comparing them to the absurdist shoe hat created by Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937.
[70][71] Performance scholar Franziska Bork Petersen picked up the thread of Charleston and Granata's arguments in her book Body Utopianism (2022), analysing the armadillo shoes as analogous to prosthetics in their altering of the human form.
