happy feet
The older I get, the fuzzier things seem. But one thing remains clear, and that’s my unswerving belief that you must suffer for beauty. Feel the burn and squeeze into your Earl jeans. Feel the bunion and take over the world in your Manolo Blahniks.
And then I met Taryn Rose.
I know more about Rose’s feet than I do about my family’s. They’re kind of flat, which means she usually needs a bit of arch support. And Rose is a very fashionable girl, not trendy, the elegant sort who’s on a first-name basis with purveyors of Armani and Prada.
Fortunately for Rose, being chic doesn’t mean being down at the heels. She has tapped into a line of shoes as high-end as her Dries Van Noten trumpet skirt. She’s also tricked out with features that actually feel good on her feet. She even has connections with the designer. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s her company--Taryn Rose International.
And don’t think the peculiar advantages of running a footwear company are lost on her. At the moment, Rose is rifling through her fastidiously edited closet in the rambling Palos Verdes home she shares with her radiologist husband, Dr. Sven Rose, and their 10-month-old daughter, Anneka. She stops
at a regal Prada skirt in brown-and-black tweed and points to a pair of Taryn Rose pumps with a satin-elastic T-strap. “I’m having these made in brown with black piping,” she says. “That’s the great thing about having a company. You can design shoes to match.”
She’s every inch the fashion diva, but with an unusual pedigree. Rose, 33, is a Vietnam-born, USC-trained orthopedic surgeon, so she’s seen the battle scars of women who cram their feet into the latest high-heeled glass slipper on the runways. She’s witnessed the calluses, the bunions, the hammer toes--the ugly result of suffering for beauty. “I’ve seen women come in with their foot being in the shape of a pointed-toe shoe,” she says with raised eyebrows.
Like the physicians who’ve lent their professional imprimatur to skin-care lines in recent years, Rose saw an opening in the business of making women beautiful. “I thought if shoes were just made correctly in the first place, a lot of women could avoid feeling the pain from their footwear,” she says. “And that’s what I set out to do.”
A little more than two years ago, she joined forces with Thierry Rabotin, a footwear designer who’d spent several years working for Robert Clergerie. Rose selects lush materials such as lambskin and beading and edits the classic-line Rabotin designs. She also prescribes certain features for her footwear--lightness, flexibility, arch supports on occasion, depending on the shoe’s design, and a lining made with poron, a foam with long-lasting spring. The shoes are all made on a round-toed form that takes into account that there should be more room for the big toe than the little one. “It has to be wide enough to accommodate a real woman’s foot, not Barbie’s,” Rose says.
And, of course, there are Taryn Rose’s simple heels, an airport-sprinting 1 1/2 inches high, that mesh nicely with her timeless sense of style. “A woman who invests $265 in a pair of shoes shouldn’t have to get rid of them the next season because they’re no longer the trendy style,” Rose says. Hear, hear.
Taryn Rose says that with the help of shoe artisans in Parabiago, Italy, who have also manufactured for Donna Karan, it last year turned out $2.6-million worth of luxury good-for-you shoes, which are carried by Nordstrom and 150 stores around the country. In Southern California, the line is available at the Beverly Hills Taryn Rose boutique, which opened in September 1999, as well as Amarees in Newport Beach, Village Footwear on Larchmont Boulevard, Soulier in Santa Monica, Verona in San Marino and Lulu Brandt in Pasadena.
“Her whole concept is luxury and comfort and that’s important to us too,” says Lulu Brandt co-owner Karen Brandt, who began carrying the line after spotting a pair of Taryn Roses on the designer when she was shopping at the boutique. “I’m on my feet all day long and I like high heels, but it’s not always practical for me.”
Smart women wear lower heels. Literally. Rose likes to quote a statistic from the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society, which found that the higher a woman’s education level, the lower her heels.
Oh, yes. Did I forget to mention that Rose loves Manolo Blahniks--I mean, really, really adores them? Not that they couldn’t be improved, of course. Rose wore a pair to her graduation as a resident in orthopedics after getting Blahnik himself to do surgery on her stilettos. The maestro had her heels lowered to 2.5 inches after she met him during an appearance at Neiman Marcus. Says Rose: “I love fashion so I treat this as a dessert, just as I love ice cream, but I don’t eat it at every meal. I think that if women take that attitude, we can have a lot of fun, and look good and feel good.”
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Irene Lacher last wrote for the magazine about Nickelodeon.Styled by Kerri Sengstaken; hair and makeup: Stella
