Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
What may look to you like a brightly coloured zip sewn on to an implausibly high heel is, in fact, the shoe of the season, writes Jess Cartner-Morley.
And it's its very absurdity, of course, that makes Christian Louboutin's zippy Rodita sandal special.
For those of you who may be a little behind with this month's glossy magazines and weekend supplements, here is the digested read: if you don't own these shoes, you are a loser.
Granted, they don't spell it out quite as starkly as that, but the message is nonetheless pretty clear, such is the ubiquity of Christian Louboutin's zippy Rodita sandal, currently being snatched off shelves everywhere even at a strikingly credit-crunch-proof BD300.
What may look to you like a brightly coloured zip sewn on to an implausibly high heel is, in fact, the shoe of the season.
The very absurdity of this shoe is, of course, what makes it special. There is no longer anything remarkable about a woman with a shoe fetish. Quite the contrary: being obsessed with Manolos/blowing the rent on Choos has become a Girl Guide badge of belonging for the modern woman.
Love of shoes has become the most boring cliche of modern womanhood. If you don't agree, try buying a birthday card for a woman between the ages of 20 and 70, and you will see what I mean: when you discount the cards that have footballs on them, and ignore the ones that feature either Bratz or sentimental poetry in swirly handwriting, what you are left with is an endless selection of pictures of shoes.
As fancy shoes have become ubiquitous, fashion has had to edge further into crazyland just to keep a respectable distance from the masses.
Note that these zippy numbers are by Christian Louboutin: just as a gourmet in a chocolate shop might demand Valrhona or Amedei over Green & Blacks in order to signal connoisseurship, the hardcore shoe obsessive likes to name-check Louboutin rather than, say, Dior or Prada, in order to signal her refinement.
They are ankle-breakingly precarious, endowed with enough hardware to set off security alarms at 20 paces and dizzily high. But when the girl next door is wearing 10cms patent slingbacks, what can a fashion victim do?
