Tango Shoe Divas

(I’m sorry, I really didn’t intend for the title to rhyme, but now I can’t bring myself to change it …)

Hello! This is my introductory post on the main page of Tango Shoe Divas. I wrote a couple shoe reviews on my blog and was chastised for not sharing them here … so here I am! I am a budding shoe addict who came to tango from modern dance, where we don’t wear shoes at all. I blame tango for making me a shoe person.

I have a penchant for t-straps, low heels, dark colors, and flexible soles. In my slightly-over-a-year of dancing tango, I have collected six pairs of shoes: 2 Tango Wear, 1 Comme Il Faut, 1 Darcos, 1 Traspie and 1 pair of street shoes. I’ll start by gushing over my Tango Wear shoes.

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Continuing my theme of love hate relationship with buying shoes, today’s episode is about Tango-Wear. First the bad: mainly that we ordered on April 29th and we got them yesterday and one of the pairs from our order was not included (purposefully since we were starting to whine). 3-4 weeks shipping, my cute white hiney! Communication was a little wonky at times (several day email delays) but the people are always nice to deal with. They gave us a nice discount since we were ordering 6 pair and I of courseharangued them mercilessly with color combination changes, heel and platform changes… (and I feel like I got a lower heel than I asked for)

But in the end…

I LOOOOOOOVE my shoes.

You might recall that I narcissistically blogged (that IS redundant isn’t it) about designing this shoe all the way back in January (delayed gratification is good to keep me from buying 18 gazillion pairs of pretties…) The main goal was to try out the stiletto heel with a thin platform. So I was originally going to use “Atei” as the base (love the lines of this shoe and will probably get one more more…)

		I had trouble finding a color/heel combo that I liked. They unfortunately could not put the pretty avocado green heel onto other shoe models and didn’t have a metallic green stiletto. I didn’t want to bring any other colors (gold, black) into an already loud shoe. So in the end I used the “Green Diva” shoe as the base (so I could get the fun avocado colored heel).
Now to fix the color problem. I have a love hate relationship with metallics. They are beautiful and all, but they do NOT last (some of my favorite pairs have shown significant wear on the first day!). These shoes are not decorative. They work hard. I dance hard. I embellish, sweep, tap and trap. I do not want to be flinching every time I wear my pretties. So metallics are now for accent only.
So I asked for suede. I thought that this kind of dark, foresty suede would be nice with the avocado (and not show dirt as badly…) but we kind of went back and forth via email on several colors (did I mention that I make them work for their money?) So the shoes when they arrived were a bit of a surprise…

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I haven’t shared a shoe story in some time and so here goes. A shoe story of my favorite shoes- Neotango. No, they don’t have all the cool styles that Comme Il Faut has, but they do deign to make shoes at a heel height lower than 3″, and offer a tad more padding than some of the brands out there which makes me pretty happy.

I had been going to try some Delie shoes out, after hearing they had decent foot padding, and couldn’t get a reasonable match in sizing…so gave up. Then I saw these pretty shoes….

I had seen some on the Diva boutique website, but with heels too high and so I ignored them, then I found these through Felina shoes. They are suede (my favorite), style #113 with a sparkly lame’ woven heel cage and a very comfy and stable 6.5cm heel (though you can get them higher) that is slender and sexy but not a stiletto. I swear, it’s like wearing flats after torturing my feet for so long in heels over 3″ high! The front end is rounded, which is nice becasue you don’t get your toes squished together that way, but they are still a peep toe so your toes have some protection.

These are classy and dressy. I really love them but would also love to see Neotango release some more colorful styles in the 6.5cm height. The only current 6.5cm styles are red and black, with one purple metallic sandal in the style I don’t like becasue your toes fall out the side….and that’s my only beef with Neotango…otherwise…I actually prefer them to Comme Il Faut. The soles are very flexible, I can get a lower heel that isn’t ugly and is very stable, and they’ll last a good long time.

Browsing the Tara site after a long day of entirely too much talking (Yes, when I am brain dead I look at pictures of shoes to relax.)  I looked at some of the new, light colors that she is offering for summer.  I need some light color shoes, but I don’t know if I can deal with white/linen color.  I think I would cringe at every foot drag, sandwich, etc that a leader did.  But then I looked at her Coming Soon and there was “Calesita”


I have mixed feelings about this shoe. On the one hand I have been looking for a fun springy shoe and this would look great with a denim mini. And she says that this is a new flexible platform, which I find very interesting. But I am not in love with the buckles. I have a shoe with buckles across the toes and I get blisters under the buckles. I am afraid that these would be the same way…

I am sorely tempted though. Do the shoe divas have any opinions?

I don’t have time to do the full run down on Darcos from the last shoe order I made, I just want to share this picture that I saw today while trolling ebay… (yes, even now, at tax season, owing various governments more money than I care to think about, the siren song of tango shoes still calls my name) This picture highlights the problems with Darcos - In general I rather like the shoes. I’m into neutrals and light colors right now and the little bit of a “bling” heel keeps them from being too boring. And there the eye is drawn to the problem… Look at the angle of the heel on the shoe facing away from the camera. The shoe can barely maintain its own axis and says “Please fall down and break and ankle while trying to dance in me!”


None of the shoes that I have bought from Darcos have this, but inconsistency is their biggest problem and it is really dragging down their value when other things are quite good (Style most of the time, padding that is better than CiF most of the time…) I will have to save my BIG Darcos rant for when I have time to take pictures and really go off.

Ahhhhh.  The host did something a little bit wonky and in trying to fix it I made it 1000 times worse!  Hey, I am a dancer and a fluffy, fashonista, shoe addict, not a sys-admin or programmer.  But I am crossing my fingers, I seem to have fixed things (without prostrating myself before the various computer geeks that I know!).  I have 8 (!) installations of the Word Press software trying to fix things and I will hopefully not break anything else trying to clean up (not cleaning up is what caused the last catastrophe).  I know a lot more about the mysql storage structure now so hopefully any damage I do will be easily restored this time.  For all of you that have stuck with me, I’m glad you are still here and I have a couple of new rants and raves forthcoming, as soon as I know that everything is running right!

I don’t have any great shoe pr0n but I have a picture that one of my shoe sisters snapped of my shoe wall during a recent party… It’s blurry, but amusing…

Since I started leading I have discovered an new problem. I need more shoes. Stop laughing. Seriously. I have ONE pair of 3 inch heels and the rest are 3.5 and 4. For awhile I led in my “Go-To” following pair, but as I got serious I realized that I needed the grounding of a real pair of lead shoes. I bought a cheap pair of canvas ballroom shoes with a 1.75″ heel - they work ok, but they are UGLY, they truly offend the Shoe Diva in me. I have also bought a couple of pairs of street shoes with varying results (one pair I really like, but they are gold, and I find myself having to constantly find new clothes to go with them because I wear them so much).

These are what I’ve been trying to lead in:

Additionally I think about occasionally going out for some swing dancing. Guess what? I don’t have any swing dance shoes either. Can you imagine me trying to Lindy Hop in 4″ CiF? Could someone call an orthopedic surgeon and keep him on hold? (I HAVE done it in 3″ Jorge Nel shoes however - the swing dancers thought I was nuts… They were probably right.)

So here is a list of my demands:
Ideal lead height <2"
Chunky Heel for stability
Looks ok with a skirt (Dance sneakers look ridiculous on me)
Cute enough to be my primary swing shoe
A platform would be really nice (with a 2-2.5" heel would be awesome)
Can I dream that I could follow in them?

I am getting desperate. I'm teaching. I'm leading. I dance 5+ days a week. And dammit, I want to go swing dancing! It was getting to the point that I had been toying with the idea of sucking it up and buying some Jorge Nel (my negative association with my JN shoes is actually what inspired me to start this site). I actually kind of like these but with this heel (The picture on the left, I’m imagining them in silver leather with maybe a black or grey mesh). But I was really disappointed to find that he doesn’t offer a platform option (of course the platform is part of what caused the problem last time…). He does offer these in virtually unlimited colors (picture on the right) but by the time I get a platform, arch support and proper padding they would be $150… Ouch!

Desperate times call for Jorge Nel?

I was heading that direction, but salvation is at hand!

Reviewing comments here, I realized I might be making a logical error. Stop trying to make tango shoes work for swing, make swing shoes work for tango… Enter Aris Allen. Now I don’t know all that much about swing shoes (it’s been at least 5 years since I went swing dancing!), but I have done some looking around and these seem to be the brand. Long ago, before the explosion of tango shoes, I had considered getting some Bleyer swing shoes as a comfortable practice alternative, but they seem to have disappeared (thank you weak dollar and crashing economy…)

So this is my current frontrunner:

It’s no CiF, but I think it might fit the bill. It has a leather sole, a platform and the heel height is perfect (2.25 - .5 inch platform). And it is only $90 with all the options! Anyone want to tell me that it is the most hideous thing ever? Because if you don’t talk me out of it those babies will be here, hopefully before the next time we have practice.

There are a bunch of oxford styled shoes, but there are some others that I think would be good with skirts:

Closed Back Wedge, funky but kind of cool…

Mary Jane (no platform on this one, but I like the look)
Rug Cutter - I like this style, but I have gold shoes that I like for now.

Hmmm. It is hard for me to buy sensible shoes, but these are looking pretty good, all things considered… Anyone want to tell me that I am crazy?

It’s that time of year isn’t it. I got this question twice in comments so I thought I would throw it out to the ladies in general.

From a MALE user:
“I know she reads Tango Shoe Diva so everything will be written with strict confidentiality using only anonymous pronouns; but what do you think of a woman who refuses to let her man (and tango partner) buy new shoes with the claim “but you just bought me new pair of ‘Comme Il Faut’ shoes”? The term ‘fetish’ has even been tossed about by this lovely lady when I complain I need to purchase another pair for her. Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Is it me … or her? Comments please?”

From my point of view there are two possibilities here, one is the “Oh, honey, you don’t need to buy me anything!” but she will be secretly thrilled. It IS Valentines Day after all and CiF ARE jewelry for the feet. On the other hand, if she’s really serious then you risk her being angry for not listening to her. I know that the more tango shoes I own, the more particular I get about adding new ones to the collection… I’ve become a regular control freak about what goes on my feet. I am only looking for very particular combinations of styles, colors and heel heights, so make sure that you can make a good selection for her on those factors before you decide to go ahead and buy shoes for her anyway.

And on the subject of shoe fetish… Join the club. I think there are a lot of mild shoe fetishists amongst the tango leaders. I am fond of saying that Tango is the only safe place for a straight man to openly notice and admire women’s footwear. Heck, we spend $200 a pair on them, we’d be disappointed if you guys didn’t appreciate them a little…

And for you and all the other Shoe Fetishists out there, here is a picture of me and my “Shoe Sister” when we realized that we had perfectly matching nail polish to each other’s shoes!

It’s been sooooo long since I bought any new shoes… My last pair were at the beginning of November! That’s almost three months with NO new shoes. I was going into withdrawl. So I splurged… naughty, naughty, naughty. I would try to justify it by the fact that I have a great skirt to go with the first pair, and really no silver stilettos, but really at this point no one believes my rationalizations at all. So I will just shut up and make with the shoe pr0n…

Yes I love them and I hate them, but I can’t stop buying them, it’s Darcos! I need platform shoes, but these are pretty… Now to wait, and wait and wait. I hope they manage to stay a little closer to their advertised timeline this time… Last time it was 10 weeks, I’ll have the tango shoe junkie shakes by then. Now if I can just resist bidding on any of the new pairs they listed today… these especially…

soooo pretty. I don’t have quite that shade of lavender yet. No! Someone else bid on them, pleeeeeaaaaase!

While my Love/Hate relationship with Darcos has been discussed thoroughly, I have managed to convince myself to order another pair (which I am NOT going to show you yet…) and in convincing myself that I deserve yet another pair of shoes, I also seem to have enabled one of my friends.

So here is my dilemma. Both I and the other shoe diva wear a size 7.5 and have gotten a perfect fit by ordering down a half size (ie a size 7). I had to discover this by ordering one pair that don’t fit particularly well. But my other friend friend wears a tiny size 6! It seems so extreme to tell her to order a size 5.5, but I hate for her to have to go through the wrong sizing issues that I did.

So does anyone ELSE have any experience with sizing and Darcos, especially if you have tiny, tiny little feet? (Her feet are so small I don’t know how she balances to dance!)

And because it would be a boring post without a picture, here is a dose of SHOES!

Bonus points if you can tell me what pair of shoes belong to me!