If you have ever searched for “nude shoes” or “nude heels” are, then you’ll already know the results produce many pictures of shoes in a beige or perhaps even pinkish shade.
Which begs the question: if nude shoes are all a shade of light brown or lighter, who exactly are they skin-color for?
Are these heels only supposed to match the skin tone of white people bearing a light tan? Because that is the perception and it doesn’t sound particularly fair to us.
Certainly shoes in this one light color are not the naked shade of a majority of the population.
The question is important since one of the perceived attractions of “nude” heels is they elide the visual distinction between where your leg ends and your shoe starts, thus making your legs look longer.
But that trick only works if the heels are the same shade as the bare legs (or close to it). So the use of the term “nude” in fashion circles seems to exclude a large portion of the population from doing the trick heels based on their skin color.
Given the huge number of imaginative names there are for shoe colours, we think it’s unnecessary to refer to beige/light brown or any one shade as “nude”.
Surely all skin colours have an equal right to the term?
The good news is that some labels and designers agree. At the forefront is Christian Louboutin who produced his famous So Kate pumps in five different shades of skin color back in 2014.
In 2016, Louboutin expanded his nude range to seven, announcing on Facebook that “two new hues join our Nudes collection to create a spectrum of seven suited to any skin tone, from porcelain to deep chocolate.”
“You don’t have one skin tone, you have so many skin tones,” Louboutin said in a video interview with Coveteur in 2019 (above). The designer explained that he started out with five skin tones, then seven and is now “going on nine”.
“I saw that people love what you call nude but what is nude basically?” Louboutin asks. “For a pair of shoes it’s basically having a pair of shoes which disappears on your skin so if you look from afar you just see the length.”
“Nude is not one color, it’s a spectrum of color going from a very fair complexion to a dark complexion,” Louboutin points out.
“If you’re doing nude shoes then you have to keep it close to the skin of women – you have to work with the skin complexion of women. And beige, this beige, is just a complexion for a few people.”
“So I don’t think it’s inclusive or anything, I just mean it’s very normal and that’s the minimum that one can do,” he concluded.
Chinese Laundry is another brand that has recently embraced skin tone diversity. When told that some models were having to color the label’s Teaser 2 platform heels to match their skin in 2019, the label promptly added more hues to their range.
And Nine West is another brand embracing diversity and inclusion on this front. “‘Nude’ is not one shade fits all – which is why we carry five tones from Ivory, to Barely Nude, to Natural, to Light Brown, and Brown,” Nine West said on Facebook in 2021.
Nine West has continued to make the point on social media, publishing its many shades of neutral shoe with taglines such as “shop your shade” and “a shade for every skin tone”.
“Shades of Nude to match shades of you” is our personal favourite from Nine West. The label published the line with its its long-standing #TatianaTuesday hashtag, which encourages wearing Nine West’s signature pump Tatiana on – you got it – Tuesdays.
In the end, calling a shade nude or neutral seems to us to be something that could perhaps best be consigned to the past. If “nude” means everything from the palest pink to the darkest chocolate then it’s not really a shade. It also makes selecting nude as a color from an online shoestore to be rather pointless.
Perhaps its time to call colors or shades what they actually are and leave the true “nude shoes” as clear heels? At least with a see-though shoe there’s no doubt that you’re putting your true skin color firmly on display.
But if we can’t drop the term all together, having a wide range of shades called “nude shoes” seems to us to be the next best thing.
Feature image credit: Saquan Stimpson/monstershaq200, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
