I have owned these ludicrously expensive Hogan sandals for almost a decade now. I splurged on them during a family vacation in Italy during college; I had just spent a semester abroad (at UCL, in England) and was feeling very cosmopolitan and swan-about-y and world-traveler-ish and thought that it’d be nice to bring home some fancy leather shoes as a souvenier of my wanderings.
So they were ridiculously pricey (I can’t remember how much exactly, but I know that it was a ludicrous amount for what are, essentially, flip-flops), but over the years these shoes proved to me the value of occasionally laying out extra cash in exchange for quality: eight years and countless city treks later, they looked more or less brand-new, and never once required a trip to the shoemaker.
Until Virgil got his paws on them, that was.
He chewed up my Hogans. Which really sucked. But what sucked more was that I didn’t notice that he’d munched almost clean through one of the thongs until I was out and about on the Lower East Side, and the top half separated from the bottom half, making walking completely impossible.
But! No problem at all, when one has a mini binder clip handy. A steadfast refusal to clean out one’s purse has its occasional benefits.
P.S. Apologies for sad pedicure. I tried to Photoshop it back into prettier territory, but am pretty unskilled at such things and succeeded only in turning my entire big toe bright red.
