Given that Dua Lipa is one infinity-pool selfie away from joining the Balearic Tourism Board’s payroll, you can imagine she’ll be into Sabato De Sarno’s spring 2025 offering–inspired, per the show notes, by the designer’s August holidays in Formentera–but for the 2024 iHeartRadio Music Festival on Friday night, she turned to the Italian label’s Y2K archives, instead. This being a Vegas-based event, Dua’s overall look felt Showgirls-adjacent (chainmail bra, skirt zipped open to the thigh), yet her shoes took her outfit into gothic revival territory.
When Tom Ford debuted the strappy heels on his fall 2002 catwalk, Vogue labelled them “vicious”, an emblem of the dangerous glamour that Ford was then espousing not just at Gucci but at Yves Saint Laurent, too (“Tom Ford is very, very good at being wicked,” as Sarah Mower put it.) His inspirations for that season at the former house were, by turns, ’30s silhouettes, antique kimonos, and the undead, which translated into a series of obi jackets, crucifix necklaces, and lace-up sandals on the runway. Lipa wore the latter in their most simple form last night (leather heels with grosgrain lacing), but it’s the mother-of-pearl encrusted versions that have become a cult fashion obsession among Tom Ford-era Gucci collectors, as seen on Natalia Vodianova in the collection’s monochrome campaign.
There’s another reason that the fashion world remembers Gucci’s fall 2002 show, however: it featured the second most infamous fall in modeling history after Naomi’s 1993 tumble in her Vivienne Westwood ghillies. With his typical flair for opulence, Ford had chosen to present the collection to a Stevie Nicks soundtrack on a fur-lined runway in the Hotel Diana, and Michelle DeSwarte made it halfway down the plush catwalk before Bambi-ing in her four-inch crocodile-skin heels–twice. “This,” André Leon Talley surmised at the time, “could break her career.” As it turned out, she was just fine – although, as the Spent creator told Vogue recently, she “still can’t listen to ‘Edge of Seventeen’”.