Monday: Louboutin espadrilles

My sister is in town for 60 hours. Which means we’ll be shopping for probably 40 of ’em. (Thank god for online shopping; otherwise I wouldn’t know what to do with myself after the stores closed.) Really, there’s nothing like having someone related to you peer-pressuring you into spending lots of money.

Today we hit the outlets, which are always hit or miss. This time it was an unqualified hit! First stop was the Space store (a.k.a. Prada outlet), where there was an additional 80% off outlet prices for items from three or four seasons ago – which means you want to stock up on the basics rather than the signature items that everyone saw in every magazine and already looked so last year, last year. (Though you can also rationalize that eventually that stuff could be considered vintage.) My loot: two cashmere-silk blend scoop neck pullovers with adorably (but not clownishly) ballooned sleeves; a black silk chiffon and lace skirt; a peach satin camisole; and an ivory silk chiffon and lace wrap. Damage: A mere $461.15. My sister’s tab: $240 for two pairs of brocade sandals decorated with plastic beads (but not the yellow-and-green pattern that was everywhere in spring ’03).

Next stop: Last Call, the Neiman’s outlet. Totally picked over and crowded. We head right out.

At YSL we both try on a mauve suede laced-up tunic from a few seasons ago. A bargain at 90% off, $180! Totally cute, too, in a Daniel Boone kinda way, but then as I try to take it off, I feel like I was trying to escape from a straitjacket. No matter how great a deal it is, I really have to draw the line at a piece that should have come with an orderly. Parenthetically: Looking at the handbags there reminds me that I’ve recently seen pictures of Nicole Richie carrying a Mombasa bag around. It might just be safe to put mine into rotation again.

At Carolina Herrera we score our best buys of the day: crocodile belts in yummy colors perfect for the summer, coral, chocolate brown and aquamarine. Ten bucks each! Yes, you read that right! Ten bucks!

After lunch we decide to give Last Call a last chance. And the shopping gods were clearly watching over us! Exhausted by the madness, I’m leaning on a tapestry-covered armchair that seems to be for sale though it was in the women’s department, when I spy a berry-hued, honeycomb-patterned Missoni coat from the fall collection. My heart skips a beat, and my mouth goes dry. I may even gasp audibly. I eye the shoppers around me suspiciously, and then I go in for the kill… I had bought a yellow-and-olive version of the coat at Bergdorf’s after Christmas, but returned it because it made me look like a plump banana that was about to explode. Back then it was already about 60% off at $965, but this one at Last Call is marked down to $753, plus 20% off (and 5% off for using my Neiman’s card). Which all adds up to an unbelievable deal: $620. And no, it does not make me look like an exploding raspberry.

A good day was had by all (except perhaps the couple of women I may or may not have intentionally elbowed in order to snag that coat). And now, I’ve got a few more hours before bed for some online shopping…

Saturday: Prada crocodile thongs

My name is Alex, and I am a shoeaholic.

Not that this should have come as any surprise to me, or to anyone related to me, or anyone who has ever met me, for that matter. But this weekend, when the sun decided to finally come out, I wanted to wear the new Prada sandals that I had clearly overoptimistically bought way back in March when the first of the spring merch was hitting the stores. So I ventured into the closet in my bedroom to look for them. Now, for anyone who has ever lived in a tiny apartment in New York, or London, or any other overheated housing market, you know this isn’t some fancy walk-in closet. (In fact, I once had such problems finding an apartment with suitable storage space in London that I had to upgrade to a tiny two-bedroom: one for me, one for my wardrobe. That was a beautiful thing. If a financially stupid one.)

In any case, my closet is about ten feet high, four feet deep and four feet wide, and every square inch is fully crammed with clothing and shoeboxes. I realize that a trip to the Container Store might have made for more efficient storage of those shoes, but I once lived through the nightmare of coming home one day and seeing a trail of water coming from my closet. Something had leaked from the apartment upstairs… You can only imagine the psychic trauma of that day. The horror, the horror! So long story short, no, I will never get rid of my shoeboxes. But I digress.

The shoe boxes are piled up, and they have started to obstruct my access to the clothes hanging on the rods behind them. In fact, one Bergdorf Goodman shoe sale more, and I won’t be able to see over them. I dread ever cleaning out this closet, even though there are always those Eureka! moments when I rediscover a beautiful pair of sandals or mules that I had bought oh, maybe six months — or let’s be honest, six years — before, and had simply never gotten around to wearing. And maybe at that point I’d actually even have something to wear with them.

This time, I had a few too many of those moments. So that’s where those precious beige leather-and-snakeskin Christian Louboutin peep-toe slingbacks were! Reunited, and it feels so good… And the peach satin Gucci slides with the gold bamboo heels, from last summer. And the navy and cream toile-print espadrilles I’d bought in Seattle in 2003. Damn, those would have been in style last summer. After a good thirty minutes of cooing and sighing over my virgin footwear, I realized I was trapped in the middle of a mountain range of shoeboxes, and I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner across town in ten minutes.

Needless to say, I never threw out anything — and I never found those Pradas. I settled for these crocodile thongs instead. I just knew I had a pair like this!

Thursday: brown Louboutin slingbacks

The other day, as I sat at my computer at work writing about the waist size of Lindsay Lohan’s jeans, I pondered the value of a $120,000 college education. Was it truly my lot in life to chronicle the J.Lo style, to be the Boswell to Beyoncé’s booty? Did I endure four years of English lit, history, philosophy and the odd science class for this?

And then I got distracted by Katie Holmes’s shockingly inadequate use of foundation and concealer as she was delivered onto the Oprah stage like a lamb taken to slaughter. Note to self: Send that girl some FACE Stockholm Picture Perfect Foundation.

So I’ve read some Sartre in French and have been known to entitle an article about the new Nikes “A Great Leap Forward.” But did you see that Hermes bag Demi’s been strategically carrying to hide her bump? Gotta get me some of that. I confess I can’t even tell you how many pairs of shoes I have. But I could tell you that the cost of those $585 crocodile-trimmed straw Prada wedges I just bought, amortized over the course of the summer, isn’t really that unreasonable!

Call me smart — and shallow.

This, then, is a diary of a mad, clad-in-black woman — a fashion writer at a newsmagazine, a magna cum laude in Manolos. To misquote Descartes: I shop, therefore I am.