comfortable couture – shoes you can wear all day

Anyi Lu Couture Comfort Footwear

Anyi (rhymes with Kanye) Lu had her eureka moment in 2003. Lu’s sister called a few days before her wedding complaining because she couldn’t find comfortable shoes to dance in after the ceremony. Lu, who had sufficiently scratched the itch for ballroom dancing for six years solved the problem by buying her sis a pair of ballroom dancing shoes, which she wore through the entire evening.

Lu did her research, and discovered that a study by the American Podiatric Medical Association showed 39% of women wear high heels daily, 42% of women wear uncomfortable shoes as long as they are fashionable, and 73% of women had shoe-related foot problems. “Women need to understand that higher is not always better,” expresses Lu, “the ideal shoe height is less than three inches. I suggest that when women try on shoes in a store they step off the carpet and walk on a hard surface – concrete or marble. Life is not always conducted on a padded carpet. We live and wear our shoes in the real world.”

Using her engineering background, Anyi Lu is one of the first couture shoe designers to use NASA-designed Poron, material used for extreme, high-impact protection for support and moisture management, in her pumps. While you’re going to spend around $400 a pair, the shoes are high-quality, taking an average of two weeks to make. The soft leather lining is stitched to a leather insole and is sewn to the leather upper so the shoe encloses the foot like a glove. Unlike other shoes, these are made sans metal shanks inside the shoe, thus allowing for a lighter and more flexible high heel. Each pair of Anyi Lu shoes are touched over 100 times by the Italian craftsmen who sew each shoe.

See Anyi Lu‘s full line of shoes here.  You wont be disappointed!