I Found the Most Beautiful Shoes in the World. Unfortunately, They’re $2,000.

There are expensive shoes I admire, expensive shoes I think are ridiculous, and expensive shoes where I spend ten minutes trying to figure out whether I actually like them or whether years of fashion conditioning have simply taught me that if something costs enough money, I should squint thoughtfully and call it directional.

And then there are these.

The Givenchy Boudoir heeled mules, covered in enormous vermilion leather rose petals, are $2,000 and may be the most beautiful shoes I have ever seen. This is deeply inconvenient.

Givenchy describes them with almost comic restraint as calfskin leather mules with large leather rose petals stitched on top. They have a square open toe, a sculpted metal heel with a diamond-shaped tip, and a 3.7-inch heel. They’re made in Italy, because apparently if you are going to completely destroy my ability to behave rationally around footwear, you might as well commit.

None of that really explains them, though, because these are not shoes with flowers on them. The flowers are the shoes.

Huge, ridiculous, decadent red roses have swallowed the mule almost completely, with petal after petal folding over itself until the whole thing looks less like footwear and more like something that escaped from a couture runway, a sculpture garden, or the final shot of a perfume commercial where someone has definitely made a terrible decision in Paris.

They are completely impractical, which is exactly what I want from a truly deranged luxury shoe.

I do not want a perfectly ordinary pump with somebody’s initials glued to the front. I do not want a sneaker whose primary design feature seems to be convincing strangers I spent $1,100 on a sneaker. If you are going to charge two thousand actual American dollars for footwear, I want theater. I want excess. I want the kind of shoe that enters the room before I do.

These deliver.

The heel makes the whole thing even better because it is almost absurdly delicate compared with the riot happening above it. It is narrow, sculptural and slightly architectural, disappearing beneath this massive explosion of red petals as though the whole arrangement is somehow balanced on a piece of punctuation.

I have no criticism of the design.

I do, however, have several criticisms of the price.

There is no sensible justification for a $2,000 pair of mules, and I refuse to perform the traditional fashion mathematics where you divide the price by the number of times you will wear something until, through a combination of optimism and fraud, the purchase becomes financially responsible.

Cost per wear does not apply here. These are cost per entrance.

You do not throw these on because you need something for dinner. You construct the dinner around them. You buy the dress for the shoes. You reconsider the restaurant because perhaps the original restaurant does not deserve them. You become suspicious of anyone holding red wine within a six-foot radius and quietly calculate whether you could ever forgive a friend who stepped on one.

Givenchy, naturally, recommends keeping them away from liquids, perfumes, creams, detergents, heat and light when possible, which is basically luxury-brand language for: own them, worship them, and try not to let the physical world happen nearby.

The maddening part is that I cannot dismiss them as a designer stunt. I genuinely love them.

They hit that exact part of my brain responsible for every unreasonable shoe decision I have ever made, the part that has always understood that footwear does not have to justify itself by being sensible. Sometimes a shoe gets to exist because it is beautiful. Sometimes it gets to be ridiculous. Sometimes it gets to look like an enormous red rose attached to a tiny heel and make you briefly wonder whether rent is really all that important.

Would I spend $2,000 on them?

Probably not, because I enjoy electricity and groceries.

But that is not really the point.

The point is that Givenchy has created the footwear equivalent of a love affair I cannot afford, and I resent them terribly for it.