Here's my in-person interview at the Greenwich Library with Jane Weitzman who discusses "Just Shoes: Where Art, Craft and Fantasy Meet."

These shoes are fantastic pieces of visual art Jane commissioned from artists for the Stuart Weitzman store windows. See some of the collection shown at the Flinn Gallery. You are going to love them!

Here are two of my favorites:

Left: Ida Rak, "Good Day Roseshine", Handmade Paper, Gouache

Right: Nina Bentley, "A Woman’s Platform", Mixed Media, Found Objects

Just like Rihanna revolutionized lingerie in the fashion world with her Savage X Fenty line, which celebrated not only a diverse range of women and body types, a whole new wave within the beauty industry is redefining the meaning of beauty. Ask Heather Fink, founder of The Sexiest Beauty, how to be beautiful or sexy, and her response will be: “You already are.”

“Sexy is a state of mind and actions,” Fink says.

Which is exactly how I feel about beauty. It’s not necessarily about clothes or makeup. Nor is it gender or race specific. It’s simply being true to yourself. Speaking your truth. “We embrace the unconventional, daringly, uniquely beautiful,” Heather explains. “Sexy is doing things your own way.”

I first came across The Sexiest beauty at a video shoot. I didn’t have any of my own lipstick, so tried one the filmmaker had on hand. We were going for a Gong Li shot because she’s an idol of mine, and the lipstick worked beautifully without drying my lips.

I contacted Fink to find out more and she explained with advancements in science and technology and partnering with the best beauty labs, she was also able to achieve a formula for a Mattesheen S-proof liquid lipstick that is emollient and not drying. “I’m in my 50s and it’s the first of its kind I’ve ever personally worn!” she admits.

This peeked my interest. I’ve been adverse to lipstick my entire life. Until now, I never found one—in fact I’ve never even found a lip balm—that resolves dry lips. I tried the Mattesheen S-proof liquid, and was pleasantly surprised that my lips remained moisturized. And it looked great, too. I reached out to Fink to learn more about her, and learned that, like many of us, she has experienced difficult periods in her life. After working for 25 years in corporate beauty companies, she got laid off due to the economy. She searched 8-10 hours a day for more than a year, but wasn’t able to find anything.

“I decided to just do what I know, what I love, what I feel passionate about,” she says. She started her own beauty line focusing on a different kind of beauty.

“Beauty means being free to express yourself in an authentic way and being true to yourself,” she says. “There’s beauty in diversity, unconventionality, and ‘imperfection,’ which to me, is ‘perfect.’ Beauty is always interesting, maybe extravagant, maybe simple, but never boring. As my idol Marilyn Monroe said, ‘Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring’.” Fink has made it her mission to create a brand that makes you feel confident and empowered to be the best you can be. “My job is to bring the power and pleasure of this tool to others,” she says. “To realize, feel, and embrace that YOU are the sexiest beauty.”

Fink started a #SpeakYourSexy campaign, featuring a strong, beautiful human as a brand ambassador each month to express authentic and empowering aspects of what they felt passionately about. which is truly beautiful because ambassadors get to choose a “giveback,” or cause, that would be the beneficiary of a portion of the sales during that period. Organizations that have benefited include Dress For Success, NWLC (Natl Women's Law Center), NAESV (Natl Alliance to End Sexual Violence) and breast cancer organization Beautiful Self. Giving continues to be part of The Sexiest Beauty’s mission, and more recently, Fink donated xx beauty packs to healthcare workers on the front line fighting COVID-19.

“We are people-positive,” Fink declares. “We are also sex-positive, body-positive, beauty-positive for all races, all ages, all genders, all countries of origin, all sexual orientations.”

You are human. You are beautiful.

Speak your truth, and as Fink would say, “live life to its sexiest!”

The Sexiest Beauty has invited me to be part of this campaign, which is truly beautiful, I think, because my #SpeakYourSexy giveback is Prison Writes, which brings writing into prisons and helps those who have been incarcerated to build their writing skills and tell their stories. Many of you know I teach in this program. It has been a precious gift. Working with individuals who may not have had a fair representation and didn’t get a fair shake. Their lives—and their families lives— get destroyed, often due to a drug-related, as opposed to a crime-related offenses. The Sexiest Beauty purchases through this blog will get a 20% discount off the order, and on top of that, 10% of the order will be donated to Prison Writes. Both of these will be ongoing indefinitely. Now, that’s beautiful.

Find The Sexiest Beauty at www.thesexiestbeauty.com

For purchases, use discount code BEAUTY

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What does beauty mean to you?

Everyone has their own perception of what beauty is. In this country it’s largely controlled by the media. I’m in the advanced stye group which is a group of women who are somewhere between 60 or 100. The women are all so creative and fabulous. And we do things together. We go to shows, museums, and do all this fabulous stuff. The media largely does not recognize people in my age category, but now that is changing. There’s a movement and people are putting forward the idea that there are many concepts of beauty and that it includes different sizes, different ethnicities, different sexual orientation.

Where do you look to find beauty?

Creativity. I used to paint. I didn’t paint what I call “pretty pictures.” My guy was Rothko. But there was beauty in form. It was very profound. It made my heart beat faster. After painting for years, I started to sculpt. And then the sculpture became jewelry making. Unlike my paintings, my jewelry goes with me wherever I go. People on the subway, people in the store—they see it; they comment. I think of these rings I make as a form of sculpture.

Being and influencer, do you worry about your appearance a lot?

I don’t like vanity. When I was younger, a photographer once said to my mother: “You know your daughter looks beautiful like a model.” My mother turned half way around. She glanced at me over her shoulder, then turned back to him and said, “She always looks like that.” What I got out of that was she didn’t want him to make a fuss. She didn’t like vanity. I get it. There are women on Instagram who have more followers than me, but their vanity cancels out their beauty. Because nobody wants to talk to somebody who is so into themselves.

Is there a trick to taking photos or is beauty natural?

The key is lighting. At least in terms of portraiture. Photographers who understand lighting can make anyone as pretty as she can look. It’s that simple.

How did you get into fashion influencing?

First it started because of the jewelry I made. I took it to the store to sell and there. Every once in a while, the owner would have me try on something that was new in the store. One day she had two of the ladies who worked for her dress me up. Then she said to go outside. There was someone who was going to take pictures. I said okay.

So about six months later, someone told me, “You’re in a book.” It turned out to be Advanced Style by photographer Ari Seth Cohen. Everyone in the book is over 60. I started going to parties. Then, a woman approached me who lives in Singapore and she has a blog, which I think is for women 40 plus. She asked me if I would be in her blog. She came to my apartment with a photographer who said he would teach me instagram, and during that time, he continued to take photos of me.

What’s your philosophy in life?

Love life. My mother loved life. She loved beautiful things. Well made things. And my life now is like a continuation of this—my mother’s clothes thing and my creativeness story. I have a fun, fabulous life. I walk around and talk to people. Like I went to Nordstrom’s and there was a young man. I started chatting him up. It turns out he was one of the interior designers for Nordstroms. And then two weeks later, he invited me to a party. So that’s how my life is.

Any last bits of advice about Beauty?

Ignore the media’s perceptions of beauty. It’s all fake. And superficial. Media has to do with money. It has to do with someone selecting an image and they call it beauty. And it has nothing to do really with beauty—it has to do with money and selling things. It’s racist and it’s got all sorts of really negative things associated with it. It’s not anything a woman should ever allow into her consciousness because it’s all fake. To think there’s one kind of person that is anybody’s beauty? That’s crazy. For this reason, I don’t believe in fashion. However, I do believe in style. That takes years to develop, and it’s unique to the individual.

What would you say to focus on instead?

Your own development as a human being. I read a lot as a young person. I read literature, books written by women, women who were successful. I was interested in strong women, independent, creative women. That’s how I got to be who I am. When I was young, Anais Nin’s books meant the world to me. Her diaries. I loved them. I wanted to be like her. She was free. She didn’t accept any societal constraints.

And I loved that. I love it. Henry Miller was her lover and they had no money and they lived together in a crummy apartment. But she bought one rose and one little glass, and they sat there and made beauty where they were. I wrote her and she wrote me back, saying, “Your letter is especially beautiful and I am keeping it. Love and peace. Anais Nin.”

If you love Beauty...

Beauty isn't the only book that deals with issues of race, identity, family or societal expectations, or karma. If you love beauty, here are other books I recommend:

The Bluest Eye—Toni Morrison

The seed that started Beauty was a personal I found at the back of a magazine while waiting at a doctor’s office. It said, “Be Asian, Be Sweet.” I could not stop thinking about it. Who would place an ad like that? Who would answer it? Amy, the protagonist in Beauty, slowly began to appear. Self-hatred is caused by an accumulation of experiences. By the time Amy is a teen, she has internalized years of the overt racism and daily micro-aggressions much like Pecola in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Amy grew up believing what Pecola did: that whiteness was beautiful and so she was not. Ultimately, she must confront her own beliefs in order to create the life she wants.

The Bell Jar (even though she makes a racist remark about Chinese)—Sylvia Plath

The female protagonist struggles with the expectation that she marry and live a conventional domestic life. To an observer, her boyfriend is the ideal husband. He doesn’t, however, recognize her own ambition and desire to write poetry. Plath, like most creative, ambitious women, struggled with disparities within her own marriage. Unlike Plath, we can—in fact, we must—first recognize our own purpose in life.

The Diaries of Anais Nin

—Anais Nin

Fierce, unabashedly sexual, free. Nin was the mother of sex positivity. She planted that seed. If she saw how male-centered men continue to portray women sexually in literature today, she’d turn in her grave.

The Woman Warrior—Maxine Hong Kingston

Kingston shares the perspectives of different women, one of which is mythical, and in the final chapter she speaks of her self and her frustration not only with speaking for herself, but trying to appease an utterly unappreciative mother. By the end, however, the past connects with the present, as Kingston connects with her mother and her mother’s “talk stories,” linking past with present and myth with reality.

Fear of Flying--Erica Jong

An iconic feminist novel, Fear of Flying is unflinching honest and graphically sexual. There’s the double standard in which society frowns at openly sexual women whereas men need to “sow their oats.” The fact of the matter is we are all sexual beings. When men write about women having sex, they often get it very wrong.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find--Flannery O'Connor

Life can seem to suddenly turn dark and terrifying, yet if one steps back from the situation, one can see the events that lead up to the inevitable result. A story is plotted by an author. In Beauty, Amy’s life events are part of her karmic journey. While O’Connor’s work can seem strange and ugly, she reminds us that we all have the potential for a moment of grace.

We Should All Be Feminists--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Intersectional feminism at its best, Adichie reclaims the word “feminism”; she defies stereotypes, even ones that many feminists have themselves. A feminist can wear high heels! She can wear lips gloss!

A Room of One’s Own—Virginia Woolf

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. In Beauty, Amy learns this the hard way. Without money and a room of one’s own in which to retreat, her creativity dries up. Woolf wrote this book in 1929, and yet, women continue to struggle for equity financially and otherwise.

The Hours—Michael Cunningham

Three female narratives woven together. Virginia Woolf, housewife Laura Brown, Clarissa Vaughn, all of whom feel alienated and detached from themselves. The housewife becomes obsessed with making a perfect cake, which is high stakes because it becomes a metaphor for her life. There is a scene when Laura escapes to a hotel for a couple hours to read Mrs. Dalloway. She decides she’s not going to kill herself, and yet, in a way, she is already dead.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls—Elissa Schappell

Schappell explores “types” of women. I love that she explores experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. Asian Americans are weary of the exotic Asian woman stereotype. The tendency has been to avoid writing about it. But I feel types need to be explored; only then can we see the human beneath.

Marimekko fabric, pink leather lining, black leather heels.

I started shoemaking to research my novel, Beauty. The protagonist, Amy, is passionate about fashion, especially when it comes to shoes. She's the type of person who would eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a month to save up for a pair of boots she wants. She's ultra creative, too, so I knew she would be the type of person to make them, too.

There are basic steps that need to be followed, but the process depends a great deal on design and the materials one uses. I've made about 20 pairs of shoes and boots since I started. No two designs have been the same.

People often ask what shoemaking is like. An easy ballet flat can have over 200 steps, so I'll take you through some for the Marimekko boot, which was, in comparison to the others, much easier to make.

STEP ONE: DRAWING YOUR DESIGN

STEP TWO: CHOOSING THE CORRECT LAST

A last is basically a hard plastic "foot" or mold. You can make flats with flat lasts and heels with heeled lasts. You can't make flats if you have a pair of heeled lasts and vice versa. This seems pretty obvious, but I've always been slow on the uptake, so it wasn't to me.

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STEP THREE: TAPING THE LAST

The first thing we did was tear off 4-inch strips of masking tape and line them along the edge of a table in front of us. Then we taped a last going diagonally one direction, then virtually the other. We transferred the Design (from Step One) onto the taped last. We also drew a line straight down the front and back of the shoe, bisecting it into the inner and outer parts of each shoe.

With a box cutter, we traced the front and back lines. We peeled up the tape, stuck it flat to manila cardboard, then cut it out. These are the inner and outer formes.

STEP FOUR: TAKE MEASUREMENTS Store bought shoes are set at "standard" sizes. This means you're out of luck if you have wider calves or wish the height was a couple inches taller. With custom-made boots, however, you can make them to your specific measurements. I learned the hard way there are different measurements for heels than flats! ​ STEP FIVE: DRAW THE FULL BOOT It was time to use the formes and leg measurements to create a pattern on a piece of paper. I glued it to manila cardboard, added a quarter inch along each edge, then cut it out.

STEP SIX: CHOOSE MATERIAL FOR THE UPPER

The uppers are the part of the shoe you see. I love Marimekko fabric, especially this one. It's cheerful, full of life, fun. People usually use leather to make shoes because it's more durable, but I figured this was a chance for me to explore using different materials.

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STEP SEVEN: CHOOSE MATERIAL FOR LINING

No one was going to see the interior except me, but I chose a band pink because enough was going on with the uppers as it was.

One of the mistakes I've made was forgetting to flip the pattern. I ended up with the outer of one boot and the inner of the other. The other two I'd cut had to be thrown away. I had to re-trace and cut out the correct side. The only problem was I didn't have enough fabric! I had to go back to the store to get more.

STEP EIGHT: TRACING THE PATTERN ONTO THE FABRIC

This was the fun part. I flipped the material to the back side of the fabric, traced the shape with sewing chalk, then cut it out. Shoes come in a pair, so I did this twice before flipping the pattern to the other side and drawing two more.

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STEP NINE: INTERFACING

I ironed on mesh-like material called interfacing to the back side of the fabric. This helped to stiffen and stabilize the material so it wouldn't fall like a sock to the floor. (If I was used leather for the uppers, this step wouldn't be necessary.)

STEP TEN: CUTTING THE LINING

This was the back side of the pink lining. It was lambskin which was thinner and softer than cowhide. It was also much smaller. For boots, I needed two skins.

I traced the pattern, adding a 1/4" along the edges, then cut it out.

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STEP ELEVEN: SEWING THE INNER AND OUTER SIDES OF THE LININGS TOGETHER

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STEP TWELVE: ADDING THE ZIPPER

The zipper needed to be lined up correctly so that one side was even with the other. Using double stick tape, I secured it along the inner edge of the fabric. I didn't know how to sew by machine, so my instructor stitched in the zipper.

STEP THIRTEEN: SEWING IN THE LINING Like the zipper, the lining needed to be secured with double-stick tape before getting stitched in place. It was looking like a real boot! ​ STEP FOURTEEN: TAPING THE SOLE OF THE LAST Same technique as taping the upper part of the last, but now focusing on the bottom, which created the pattern for the insole of the shoe. This was the inner part you didn't see, the area your foot rested on.

STEP FIFTEEN: TRACING THE INSOLE

Tracing the pattern onto thick, unfinished leather, I then used a 5-in-1 machine to cut out the shape of the insole.

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A 5-in-one cutter has a crank that turns gears with "teeth" that grind through leather.

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STEP SIXTEEN: SKIVING THE LEATHER

With a tool called a skive, which has a handle at one end and a blade at the other, I thinned out the 1/4" edge. Skiving is probably my least favorite part of shoemaking. It requires a lot of skill. On one hand, you need strength; it can be exhausting work. On the other, too much force and the razor can cut straight through the leather, ruining it. Skiving inevitably causes my wrist and hand to hurt.

STEP SEVENTEEN: MAKING THE INSOLE

Three stacks of leather need to be stacked, glued, and clipped together. Once the insoles are dry, they can be sanded smooth.

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STEP EIGHTTEEN: NAILING THE INSOLE TO THE LAST

The front pad of the insole gets nailed to the last so that it stays in place

STEP NINETEEN: COUNTING I made a pattern for counters, which cupped and supported the back of the foot and heel. It needs to be skived also. Fortunately, I learned to use an electric tool called the drummel, which had a bit that spun, thinning the leather with sandpaper. It was not a quick process but it was a lot easier on the hands with less chance of ruining the leather.

STEP TWENTY: SHAPING THE HEEL I ran the counters under hot water and shaped them to the back of the last. When they were dry, I drew a line bisecting the heel in half ​ STEP TWENTY-ONE: TOE PAD Counters support the back of the foot but the front needs a little support also. With a much thinner leather, I cut half moons the size of large pancakes, molding it to the toe of the last.

STEP TWENTY-TWO: SETTING THE COUNTER IN PLACE I drew a line down the center of the counters, and now I used scissors to bisect them in half. Once that was done, I glued them between the lining and the fabric. I had to be cautious to glue them on the lining side while being cautious not to get any on the fabric.

STEP TWENTY-THREE: ATTACHING THE UPPERS TO THE LAST Once the counters are in place, it was time to bring the two separate parts of the shoe--the uppers and the insole--together. First, the lining gets glue down to the bottom of the last. Once the glue is dry, the bottom of the insole is sanded smooth. Then the Marimekko fabric gets secured in place. I don't have a photo of this final lasting stage, but when I was done, the bottom of the insole looked like this: ​ ​They weren't attached yet, but I balanced the boots over the heels to see how they would look. Yes!

STEP TWENTY-FOUR: HEELS The final touch. I covered the heels with black leather. It was difficult to sole and align heels perfectly. The shoemaking lab at the JCC didn't have the correct machinery to do it correctly, so I brought them to a shoemaker on the Upper East Side. Two weeks later, I picked up my babies and tried them on for the first time. ​ Since then, I wear them all the time. Like visiting Marimekko NYC...