The Stiletto Bandit

There's a silly but very funny story in this week's New Yorker about "the stiletto bandit, a thief who has eluded N.Y.P.D. detectives since burgling the garment-district showroom of the French cobbler Christian Louboutin."

“He kicked through the wall,” Shawna Rose, Louboutin’s public-relations director, said the other day, pointing to a large, jagged crater just to the left of the office’s front door. “When I got off the elevator, I saw piles and piles of drywall and fibreglass. The door was wide open. My first thought, even though it wasn’t logical, was water damage.” The date was June 26th, a Monday morning. Rose went through the door, only to come upon a scene out of an especially hellacious sample sale. Shoeboxes and lids askew. Tissue paper everywhere. Lefts without rights strewn across the room, their trademark scarlet soles upturned like pools of blood in a Brian De Palma movie.

Did you catch that? Dude kicked through drywall to get his greedy, fashionable hands on their Spring line of unwearably avant-garde footwear.

Throughout the piece, the staff have an amusing admiration for the thief's aesthetic sensibility. "The robber, Rose realized, had selected his quarry with a finicky precision equally reminiscent of the Zodiac Killer and Diana Vreeland."

My friend and I were speculating about who the bandit might be. I was imagining a Leigh Bowery drag queen sidekicking through the drywall in a fit of retail-therapy hysteria (a high-fashion Robin Hood in Maid Marian's chunky flats?).

"God no," she retorted without pause. "It can't be someone trashy. It has to be someone with exquisite taste. And size 38 feet. Although no woman I know with 38 feet could kick through cardboard, much less a wall. So a large man with a passion for small, fashion-forward women. Andre Leon Talley on a bender, say, or Hamish Bowles coked out of his mind finding it hilarious to steal a bunch of vintage wedges for his private collection."

Bandit?

Or hero?