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The Prada slingback from fall 1995 made a clack heard ‘round the world. You know the shoe. There’s the little bra strap that hugs the back of the heel, while the pilgrim loafer front adds a dose of office-ready reserve. The combination renders the shoe both ugly and sexy; somehow modest and titillating. To me this slingback has always epitomized the quality of jolie laide—there’s an incredible “this fucks” raunch to this shoe. Look at that closed toe with the lip of the tongue flicked upwards as if it is slightly aroused. Nasty! The 1.5” heel itself is your typical sensible standard black or a dark brown, but the leather is viscously brushed to a blistering shine. This is a lady with a bite, one who wears a pump that appears prim and proper from the front, but makes a cracking palm-to-ass sound as she walks away, baring her naked heels. 

One way to think about the appeal of fashion is in its ability to become a sort of living historical record: I remember that collection, I was front row for that show, I predicted that trend, I called in that sample. This is a shoe that was there. Take the Vogue August 1995 issue. In the Grace Coddington-styled shoot “The Strong Suit,” (page 185) the heel makes a cameo on the buffed soles of German super Nadja Auermann, posing in a demented cosplay of an uptown woman who has it all. In the slingback scene, Auermann is fastened into an obsidian Ralph Lauren skirt suit as she crosses a midtown street as if she is running an errand. A cute bike messenger cuts past her. Her foot is delicately lifted to show off that bitchy little 1.5 inch (if that!) practical pump. A vision of the perfect city–somehow that much more attainable thanks to that walkable, just-a-pinch-of-a heel. 

The slingback makes another cameo in the 10-page profile on Miuccia Prada “The Prada Principle” (page 199, by then Fashion News Editor Kate Betts). The shoot, also styled by Coddington, shows a wide-eyed Kristen McMenamy with a retro ‘60s bouffant, strutting around an optic white studio in the slingback with a double-breasted fire engine red coatdress. The next page (p. 209), Trish Goff sits on a reclining caramel leather office chair with her legs crossed; the slingback casually dangling from her foot.

Just a few months later these two shoots resurface in the Vogue November 1995 issue in “She’s Gotta Have It” from fashion writer Marina Rust. It’s an incredible piece: completely blasé, monied, and hilariously self-aware. In the story, Rust, a well-heeled Vogue gal about town, expresses a soul-engulfing longing for the shoe. “That article came about because I wrote Anna [Wintour] an email about it and I said, ‘We should do a story on waitlists because this woman at Prada told me, ‘Well, there’s a waitlist for it’. It’s coming in at six and a half. You better reserve that.’ I’m like, ‘I’m eight and a half’ and she’s like, ‘It’s a hot shoe, honey—Get it,’” Rust told me over the phone. “I guess she meant in case I had a friend with a small foot or if I wanted to do some Chinese foot binding. It was that good a shoe where if you’d get your hands on it, you would buy it in any size, because it was so in demand.” 

In the piece, the mere sight of the slingback triggers a fabulous and poetic whimper from Rust. She’s in pain! And the only relief is this fabulous shoe! “I had to have them. Apparently, so did everyone else,” she wrote in 1995. When was the last time you felt that? That all-consuming feeling only a stellar fashion piece provides, which you just know would welcome you into your wildest sartorial fantasies and unlock all of your wardrobe’s—your life’s—potential? What was the last piece of clothing that made you ache? 

That Prada slingback was certainly potent. Like any truly devoted fashion disciple, Rust did the work to track the piece of footwear down: In the article, she chronicles her quest as if she’s searching for a long lost lover. (Mind you, this was 1995! There was no Google to help her. Just landlines and heaps of long distance charges. I love that Rust plays the part of a PhD student, referring to the shoe by its scientific name—Style #7775. Spazzolato. Ebano.) Rust can’t find it in Beverly Hills. They’ve only got one: in size 36. (She’s an 8.5). Rust calls Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman in New York and she learns that the shoe is exclusive to the then-two Prada boutiques. She buzzes London: no luck. But surely Milan? Home of the iconic Mrs. Prada herself? Finally, Rust scores. The story ends with the author awaiting their arrival, and presumably living happily ever after. (As we all do when we get what we want, right?)

It’s a great story, but it made me wonder: why was this shoe so hard to find? One reason was that the footwear was part of the fall 1995 Prada collection, which as a whole shook the industry. Gloria Baume, who was a Vogue Senior Market Editor at the time, recalls that this specific Prada show marked the end of the frivolous, bombastic styles of the ‘80s. Logos; Gold; Glitz: Begone. The industry had been infiltrated by demure Prada and minimalist Helmut Lang. “It was like the whole world had kind of turned a corner,” Baume told me over the phone. “That’s why I think I remember it so well. It was such a standalone time in fashion. It was nothing that we had really seen before.” 

Baume was right. Something was in the air. In a November 1994 piece titled “From the Runways to the Real World” from The New York Times series “On the Street”, the late Bill Cunningham snapped fashionable women (including über-stylist Camilla Nickerson) on the street soon after the Milan shows in slim pencil skirts that stopped at the knee, an unmistakable Prada silhouette that had made its way across the Atlantic. “The hemline has stabilized at the top of the kneecap, and the overall image is one of understated plainness in somber black, navy, ivory, beige and an occasional brown. It is a look that defines a generation’s new sense of low-key style,” Cunningham wrote. In the August 1995 paper, Cunningham photographed everyday women wearing all black and minimalist silhouettes. “Devotees of all-black were faithful from season to season,” he wrote, adding. “Many of the minimalists, in their understated dresses and suits, take their cue from the influential fitted-and-flared dress from Prada.”

This shift showed up when it came to shopping, too. “Prada and Jil Sander have given the high-end designer business not only a new aesthetic but also a lower-key style of status dressing,” wrote Amy Spindler in a June 1995 piece for the Times. Lower key, not low-key: At this time, New York was still a heel society. Girls were going to Vogue in heels. (“It was almost like an unwritten rule that you have to kind of wear heels,” says Baume, adding. “I think looking back it destroyed my feet completely.”) Girls were also going out in heels. Girls knew how to walk in heels. (Sometimes, I see a girl hobbling in a heel in the city and it’s unnatural; like a child teetering in their mother’s pumps; a flicker of playing dress up.) At a vertiginous time, the low-to-the-ground Sabrina slingback was a comfortable solve. According to Johnsen, who saw thousands of Prada slingbacks sell out: “It wasn’t a bunion maker.”

These were also the days when magazines were king. Legacy media dictated trends.(“It’s the same reason that we all agreed about the rule of law and presidents leaving office when they’re supposed to, because we all had the same news sources,” says Rust.) No TikTok. No Instagram. Stylist and consultant Laurie Trott thinks this added to the appeal. “It’s the mystery, the buildup to the release of a specific item, the analog way of being able to buy it at a store. If you weren’t in the fashion industry, you wouldn’t have known about this shoe until three months later, when a consumer magazine published a runway shot or editorial photo or a brand ad campaign,” says Trott. “That dead zone between the runway show and the release—no influencers wearing it first, no brands teasing it, no stylists posting social media pictures from shoot or BTS. Just three months of ignorant bliss.” And then there it was! And it could be yours. (If you could find it.)

The reigning Vogue girls loved Prada, too—and they were buying it. “It was a time at Prada where it was so hot that the editors would land in Milan and they wouldn’t even go to the hotel,” says Leslie Johnsen, who was the PR Director of Prada from 1994 to 1997, “They would go in their chauffeured car direct to the Via della Spiga.” Remember those budgets? (I don’t.) 

When someone buys something for themselves—not “gifted,” as so much is in the upper tiers of the fashion industry—there is a genuine tenderness embedded in that purchase. The person wears the piece with fever; passion. That “She’s Gotta Have It” effect translated for this Prada slingback in particular: editors wore them down to the nub. “I remember seeing a bunch of Vogue editors pile into a show, not unlike a flock of sheep (albeit, a fabulous-looking flock of sheep), all in the whole Prada look—knee length skirts, fancy purses and those sling-backs, not a hair out of place,” writes

Editors, the influencers of the time, were going out in these clothes; they were being seen in these clothes. And wherever they went, so did the chatter and the flash. “It was the first time that there was a creative crowd, like artists, actors, stylists, photographers, editors, and entrepreneurs who were in their 20s and 30s and were just the center of culture at the time. And these people were the ones who were wearing these clothes, whether it was the Helmut Lang suit or the Prada military coat or the slingblack,” Baume tells me. “These were the creative people that were having dinner at Indochine. It was a whole cultural moment that was happening.” 

And then the other reason why Rust and her ilk had a hard time buying: production limits. Consultant Anja Tyson worked at the Prince Street Miu Miu store between 2004 and 2005. While this was almost a decade after the Prada slingback boom, this was still before the rise of e-commerce; before someone marooned in Idaho could snag whatever they wanted from Net-a-Porter.com with two-day shipping. Taylor describes working with an actual runway lookbook and the actual physical client book in an actual brick and mortar store. “Once the item arrived, each client would have a limited amount of time to buy it before it moved on to the next person. So a shoe could arrive and if it had enough presence on the runway, it could be weeks before any regular human stopping in from the sidewalk would even lay eyes on it,” writes Tyson. “Sometimes the personal shoppers would fight or bribe to get their client to the top of the list, which is how they would maintain clients loyalty, and why people who work at Prada (or Chanel, or Celine, or whatever) have multi-million dollar client books.” 

Their books weren’t the only thing gaining value. Between the years of 1991 to 1997, Prada grew from a $25 million leather and luggage goods company to a $750 million fashion giant. Miuccia Prada established the Milanese exhibition Fondazione Prada with a few of her artist friends in 1995, the year after Prada was voted “Designer of the Year” by the CFDA. In 1997, Prada introduced the house’s line of sportswear, Prada Linea Rosa. Prada was creating a lifestyle that expanded beyond single products; it was creating a personality. And that personality wore slingbacks.

Now, there are a zillion shoes that sell out. The trend cycle is choked with cycles of options. You could argue that the 2020s version of the Prada slingback is the Adidas Samba. It’s a harbinger of a footwear choice, a signifier of how the industry and culture around it operates. Dressing the prim lady is back in—as are many ‘90s style codes—but these days office wear is more casual; heels are waning in many workplaces, especially post-COVID. (Mazel tov if you still don them!) Girls wear Samba sneakers with low-slung Aritzia or Celine trousers to their cubicle or their home office setup and then out on a date. 

While the Prada slingback phenomenon was a top-down trend—cool girls at the magazine put it in the pages; cool girls who read the magazine then bought the shoe; the Prada slingback made a sell-out splash—these days, media often works in reverse, covering the rise of a shoe or other status object only after it has debuted to the public (and often tacking on affiliate links in hopes of getting some percentage off their readers’ existing taste). 

Even if I were to find this storied slingback on a resale site (I can’t), you can’t bottle a moment. The Prada heels’ elegance is as fleeting as Nadja Auermann hailing crossing the street or Trish Goff wagging her ankle in an office chair. As fleeting as Marina Rust punching in a slew of country codes into her landline to snag a pair herself. The allure of the heel is tied to a time that we can obviously never get back. On the other hand—or heel?—its impact remains, pointing to a bygone time in the industry that was perhaps a bit more elegant; a bit more thoughtful; a bit more organic in the sense that clothes started a conversation as they were experienced: in the flesh. There’s a reason why this shoe caught fire the way it did—and a reason why I’ll always ache for it. 

Watch NEVERWORNS here. New episode coming soon.

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