by almendro 

We first noticed them a couple of years ago. Calf-high, low-heeled (no heeled, really), lace-up horrors masquerading as women’s footwear. Suddenly, they were everywhere, filling scores of shop windows with their hideousness, marring the lower extremities of nearly every female under 40. Somehow, wrestling boots had become hip.

We shouldn’t have been so surprised. This is a country, after all, where men happily wear pirate pants, and where the mullet is the default haircut for people of all sexes. The staying power of these ill-conceived booties was, nonetheless, astounding: winter, spring, season after season, Spanish girls kept tying them on.

So it was with some relief that we came across this recent Christmas display. Red suede with black laces: we can only surmise that the wrestling boot has at last jumped the shark and is headed into Spanish fashion oblivion. (Just don’t tell John Irving.)