these recycled materials are made for walking

Now that I'm going to Italy I've decided I finally need to invest that pair of comfortable walking shoes. Back in the fall when I eagerly waited for my ankle to heal so that I could once again wear my embarrassingly large collection of flats, I tried to find some shoes with good ankle support (read: hideous). Once the ankle was healed and I made the thirty-minute trek up and down University to campus in my chucks and my heels burned (and my ankle still hurt), I once again swore to get comfortable shoes and once again was turned off by the selection at the local walking shoe store.

But now, now that I am ready to finally get the shoes, what do I find? Leather. Lots of leather. Clarks now has this line called 'unstructured' which has some uber-cute flats but they are all leather and pretty pricey, too.

So I decided to risk typing in 'vegan walking shoe' and covered my eyes as some pretty unattractive shoes popped up. But what also popped up was pretty exciting. The majority of New Balance is animal free and Zappos has a 'vegetarian' filter, so you can sort out all the animal-free shoes. Through Zappos I found out that Simple is still around and has a line called Green Toe that is all animal-free and, I think, pretty cute: http://www.zappos.com/n/es/d/722581234/page/1.html.



But I realize that being veg may have altered my perception of hip. So I turn to you, my faithful readers, all both of you, for opinions on these shoes. Do they scream bay area vegan or could I possibly fool people into thinking I'm an Irish tourist who loves the meat? The flat is definitely cuter than the maryjane, but I will need a fair amount of support to get from the Forum to the Pantheon, so I'm willing to go function over form on that one.