Wearing your attitude on your heel

If the shoe on your right foot says ���Bite me���, it���s not necessarily a symptom of masochism.
Especially if the left one has a juicy red apple on it. This flirty footwear is simply out to get the attention of young bucks whose sharp eyes check women out from head to foot. Shital Deliwala designed this pair and another in which one shoe had ���333��� on it while the other cheekily proclaimed, ���I am only half as evil���.
Suddenly, the t-shirt with its funny lines and cartoon characters is not the only platform for flaunting your personality and politics. Dude, ad space for attitude has slid all the way down, past hipster waistlines and sagging crotches, to the soles of your shoes. A picture of Michael Jackson can add glitter to your boring PT whites and Che can revolutionize a soiled pair of Converses. Shoe space is not snobby and there���s room for everything from Sponge bob Square pants to Climate Change.
Attracting eyeballs feet first is a new fad among kids who like to dress. And one person���s fad is turning out to be another���s fortune. Savia Jane Pinto, the young woman who is media professional by day and designer by night, has converted her shoe fetish into a money-spinner. Pinto says quite plainly that she can���t paint on canvas unless it���s on shoes. So she took a modest course in footwear design and even worked with a designer but ditched it all for some nonsensical reason.
Fortunately, a pep talk from her older brother made her paint a few tongues of flame on old keds. ���My brother went bonkers when he saw it,��� says Pinto, who now gets about three to six orders for shoe-painting a month and charges anywhere from Rs 650 to Rs 2000 a pair. At least her clients pay up.
Delhi���s Nimeesh Pandey once designed shoes for a tattoo artist, who did a dodge when it came to paying up, suggesting that he would do a tattoo in return. That hurt, says Pandey.
Pinto, who blogs on Shoefu, is approached by rock-music freaks for Limp Bizkit (���It was so tough I could not replicate it on the other shoe���) and girls who insist on pink. A group of girls once asked her to paint a pair for a friend they were seeing off. The friend was fondly called ���Dumb Dumb��� . ���I made Eeyore the donkey,��� says Pinto. ���She loved it.���
Shoe designers are used to strange requests. A European lady asked Shital Deliwala, a graphic designer who has tied up with the lifestyle store Attic in Mumbai, to paint the names of every place she and her boyfriend had visited in India. This included everything from bus numbers to the Taj. ���Customised shoes make for great birthday gifts,��� says Deliwala, whose sam ples have lines like ���Follow your dreams��� and ���Inhale Exhale���.
Farzana Billimoria, whose brand is called Mind2Sole, was recently approached by an elderly woman who asked painted slip-ons ���because she didn���t want to bend down every time to tie a pair of shoelaces��� . Billimoria has tied up with Cafe Mondegar in Mumbai���s tourist mile and has permission to use the Colaba cafe���s Mario Miranda mural. When she first drew elephants on her shoes, her father exclaimed, ���Are you serious?��� and her banker brother asked incredulously if anyone would want to wear them.
Today, Billimoria earns so well she can afford to turn down orders When her aunt asked for Sponge bob shoes for a nephew, she said a flat no. ���He���ll grow out of them and then my art will end up in the bin.���
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