Noelle McCarthy: We need to talk about Lena Dunham's shoes

Lena Dunham (second left) - wearing a Rochas gown - with her Girls co-stars Jemima Kirke, Allison Williams and Zosia Mamet. Photo / AP Images

We need to talk about shoes. Lena Dunham's in particular. Well, technically they're Rochas' shoes, not Lena's. She's photographed wearing them in the latest issue of American Vogue, though, and let's just agree that Lena is definitely not as smart as everyone says she is if she didn't get to take them home with her afterwards.

A feathery explosion of brightest chartreuse, these mules are the very personification of whimsy luxe and the star ingredient of Annie Leibovitz's typically arresting portrait of the lady Lena.

There she sits, marooned fetchingly atop Adam Driver's shoulders, in the middle of a New York pedestrian crossing, every inch the modern-day madcap Cinderella, complete with (hipster) handsome prince and fairytale footwear.

(See the full Vogue shoot here.)

The shoes are POA of course, and odds are I'm never getting anywhere near them, but so covetable are they, so magical, that the sight of them alone was enough to make my day, and make me forget all the sticky issues around the fact that a writer as smart as Lena Dunham let Vogue have their way with her, to the extent of tarting her up with Photoshop.

Well, maybe not quite forget it. Better to say the mules anaesthetised my disquiet. I know Lena's not your average cover girl. I know this because I've seen her naked, many times, in the TV show she created.

I know better than to take at face value her Vogue-generated sleekness. I know it's all smoke and mirrors. I knew all that, even before I heard Professor Peter Shand's fabulous deconstruction of glossy-magazine-makeovers in a talk he gave last week at Auckland Museum.

He focused particularly on the digital trickery that had been used on Lena. The way in which her chin was narrowed and her bosom was lifted. That she had been subjected to Photoshopping didn't surprise me, and worse than that even, I found it hard to get exercised about the issue on behalf of all women.

It was the mules, you see. I was thinking about how they'd look on me. Where I'd wear them, and how good it would be. How much they might conceivably cost me. Do Rochas do lay-by?

These are the questions I was asking myself, while Peter was explaining to his audience how Vogue turns us all into bad feminists and excellent consumers. It's case in point, I suppose, and a win for Anna Wintour that I was too distracted by Lena's shoes to care what Vogue are doing to her.

More than that, it's a win for market forces. Lena might have looked amazing, but it's Rochas who'll be laughing ultimately, when they sell out of their POA feathery mules on account of her endorsement.

Cui Bono, is the question. Who is the winner here? Is it Vogue, is it Rochas, is it Lena? I'll tell you one thing, I know who it isn't. It takes a definite bird-brain to devote a whole column to a pair of feathery slippers.

- VIVA