Want Comfy and Cheap? Try Foot Locker, Not Nicholas Kirkwood

If you are going to charge four figures for shoes, as a startling number of designers are doing these days, it behooves you to frame them as artwork. To create a “shoe-seum,” as Kenneth Cole might put it.

Around the block from Whitney’s downtown project, the new Nicholas Kirkwood store, the London-based shoe designer’s first in the United States, is white and spare, like the galleries that also dot the neighborhood, with a patio covered in artificial turf. One half-expects stiffened cheese cubes and warm Chablis to be passed while you’re inspecting the wares, which are mostly atop treelike pedestals.

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