Crystal Dance Shoe

"The Unbroken Spell"

A shoe designed for modern dance. It appears as if enchanted, rendered translucent and evoking the presence of Cinderella's glass slipper.

The special pigment's light effects create a striking transparency and delicate brilliance, with the expression shifting as the viewing angle changes. A piece that holds a spell unbroken, even when the clock strikes twelve.

The Glass Slipper

Over 500 variants of the Cinderella story exist worldwide, with the oldest dating back to 9th-century China. Variants have been found in ancient Egypt, Southeast Asia, and Japan as well, making it a universal tale passed down throughout human history.

Among these, it was the French author Charles Perrault who introduced the now-familiar motifs of the pumpkin carriage and glass slippers in his 1697 work Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre (Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper). In his version, the ball is held on two consecutive nights, and at midnight on the second night, the spell breaks—the dress and carriage revert to their original forms—yet the glass slippers alone remain unchanged.

A famous debate surrounds these glass slippers. In French, verre (glass) and vair (a squirrel fur used in the Middle Ages) are pronounced identically. In the 19th century, Balzac suggested that the slippers were originally made of fur, bringing this debate to wide attention.

However, Perrault's manuscript clearly reads verre (glass), and the word appears three times in the text. Furthermore, research by French folklorist Paul Delarue confirmed that glass slippers appear in variants from other countries predating Perrault. Glass was a rare and precious material at the time, and its transparency and delicacy made it a fitting symbol for Cinderella. Nevertheless, the debate has never been fully settled and has continued for over 300 years.

This is, after all, a tale of magic—where pumpkins become carriages and mice become horses. Perhaps the slippers were indeed fur, enchanted to become as transparent as glass. Fur in material, glass in appearance. It might be fun to add a new possibility to a debate that has lasted three centuries.