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.