Nice Shoes

Pretty, and powerful.

Oh, it's a beautiful dress! Did you ever see such a beautiful dress? And look, glass slippers.

—Cinderella

Some characters have quirky, fancy, or otherwise unusual footwear, which the narrative makes a point of mentioning. If pimped out enough, it can even be an Impractically Fancy Outfit (especially if there are high heels).

Can overlap with Tricked-Out Shoes if the shoes have special functions as well as being pimped out.

A Sub-Trope of Costume Porn.

A Sister Trope to Nice Hat, Pimped-Out Dress, Pimped-Out Cape.

Compare All Women Love Shoes, Foot Focus (special attention given to bare feet).

Examples of Nice Shoes include:

Anime and Manga

• The gender flipped version of Prussia in Axis Powers Hetalia wears a really nice pair of white boots.
• Bel from Katekyo Hitman Reborn has a pretty badass pair of white boots, with black laces.
• In the Puyo Puyo anime, this episode focuses on Rulue noticing Arle's new boots,^[1] so Rulue demands Minotaurus to make her new boots. Minotaurus does so, and although the boots were not a great color, Rulue likes the boots and she runs off to show Arle.

Comic Books

• Envy Adams from Scott Pilgrim has a seemingly endless supply of fancy high-heeled boots. They even come up as plot point in a flashback when she sells her Anime paraphernalia to pay for a pair, highlighting how she and Scott are growing apart.

Film

• The Wizard of Oz features the Ruby Slippers - which were silver in the book, but didn't show up well on film, so they had to change them.
• I Robot: in the film version, Detective Spooner wears a "classic" pair of Converse tennis shoes (circa 2004, when the movie came out).
• Denny Colt in The Spirit also favors Converse sneakers.
• I'm Gonna Git You Sucka: After getting out of prison Fly Guy returns to being a pimp. He wears elevator shoes with miniature goldfish aquariums in the heels. When one of his shoes breaks and the fish spill out on the ground, they flop around a little bit.
• Ali in "Burlesque" ogles a pair of incredibly sparkly heels
• Rosa Klebb, villain of the James Bond movie From Russia with Love, hides poison daggers in the toes of her sensible shoes.

Live Action Television

• The fabulous mood changing red shoes in "The Wonderful Wizard of Buzz Issue" episode of The Latest Buzz.
• Firefly: River was known to tromp around in combat boots when she wasn't running around barefoot.
• In an episode of Law and Order SVU, the detectives get a search warrant to look for a pair of shoes that left a distinctive footprint at the crime scene. They don't find them until the suspect comes home wearing them. The last line of the episode is Detective Stabler saying "Nice shoes."
• The Fifth Doctor wore a pair of modern sneakers with an otherwise Edwardian Cricketer's uniform.
  • On that note, Ten's red Converse.
  • River Song's shoes. They have a facebook page.
• Ryan Stiles got a lot of jokes made about his taste in shoes in Whose Line Is It Anyway??

Literature

• Cinderella, with the glass slippers (although some versions make them fur-lined, which still fits this trope).
• Several characters in Discworld. Nanny Ogg once wears red boots as a Shout-Out to Oz.
  • Granny Weatherwax is well known for her tough old and well-worn boots.
  • Sam Vimes is a variation; his boots are always old and battered even when he can afford much better ones, but he's proud of the old cardboard-soled ones because he can feel the street through them and figure out where he is by the feel of the pavements.
• The plot of Scott Westerfield's So Yesterday revolves around a pair of these.
• In one of the Redwall books, Logalog sings a comic ballad about a shrew whose fancy shoes get stolen by an owl.
• In the Lucky Starr series, Martian farm boys, including the hero's sidekick Bigman, are known for their garishly colored hip boots. In the first book, Bigman recognizes a disguised Lucky because no native Martian would wear such a plain pair.

Mythology

• Hermes' pair of winged sandals.

Professional Wrestling

• When he was doing his Iraqi sympathizer gimmick in the WWF during the first Gulf War, Sgt. Slaughter was quite proud of his curled-toe wrestling boots, supposedly a gift from Saddam Hussein himself.

Real Life

• Chuck Taylors. Hell yes.
• Elvis Presley and his Blue Suede Shoes.
  • Actually, it was originally Carl Perkins' Blue Suede Shoes.
• Kiss wore some outlandish shoes.
• Elton John wore some gigantic shoes as The Pinball Wizard in The Who's Tommy.
• Clown shoes, always ridiculously oversized and often bright red.
• Lolita fashion has Rocking Horse Shoes, which can have platforms up to eight inches high! It also has a variety of chunky Mary Janes, tea-party flats, and, in the fashion icon Mana's case, hooker heels. But, it's just Mana who wears those. But he can get away with it, because he's AWESOME.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic has an impressive collection of Vans sneakers.
• Imelda Marcos owned thousands of shoes.

Video Games

• Xion in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days has some rather nice pointy-toed heels that get at least one close-up shot.
• In Final Fantasy VIII Rinoa's slingback ballroom pumps with closed, pointed toes and double ankle straps are likely custom-made due to her being from a wealthy family, and have been the bane of many a cosplayer. They get plenty of close-ups, which are justified as most of them come from the dance sequence.
• Final Fantasy XIII offers Lightning's knee-high strap-covered combat boots and Vanille's fur-trimmed, turned-up, square-toe cowboy boots. And yes, both get occasional shots of said shoes for no particular reason other than varying camera angles.
• Much was made of Sonic's Soap shoes in Sonic Adventure 2, and the Grinding ability that came with them. Sonic, however, has always had distinctive red/white shoes, since it's the only thing he wears (besides a pair of gloves).
• Guy from Final Fight and Street Fighter is often noted for his sneakers, which he wears with his Highly-Visible Ninja uniform. This has resulted in a meme stating, "Real ninjas wear Nikes!"
  • Likewise, his fellow Bushin ninja and sister-in-law Maki (from Final Fight 2) also switched to sneakers for her appearances in Capcom vs. SNK 2 and Street Fighter Alpha 3.
    • Along with her school uniform, Sakura Kasugano wears a snazzy pair of red Converse All-Stars when she participates in street-fighting tournaments.
• The Caninu and Felineko of Solatorobo wear shoes that have a bump pattern on the sole that leaves pawprint-shaped marks.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Snake compliments the shoes of the old soviet scientist Granin by literally saying "Nice shoes". Granin cites this compliment as the reason he's giving him valuable intel. Turns out an another spy wired the shoes.

Western Animation

• Murdoc Niccals of Gorillaz is notoriously proud of his Cuban-heeled boots and almost always wears them even when wearing nearly nothing else. According to the biography, Rise of the Ogre, he was deeply annoyed by Damon Albarn upon first meeting him, because:

The first thing Damon said to Murdoc, pointing down at his boots, was "Your Cuban heels are crap. Look, mine are the proper sort." Damon was wearing a pair like Murdoc's, but with fancy gold spurs and solid silver heels.

• Disco Stu in The Simpsons has shoes with goldfish in the soles (kind of like the aforementioned Fly Guy). Unfortunately, the fish are dead, because he can't take them out or feed them.
• In the South Park episode "the list", a group of girls fakes a list that says Clyde is the cutest boy in the class so they can date him and get shoes.
  • Even Wendy is distracted by one particularly cute pair of shoes.
• Sid's Beatle boots in Hey Arnold!.
• Jonny Quest wore PF Flyers ^{[dead link]} , even appearing in commercials for the shoes.
• Most of the characters in Teen Titans. Robin has steel-toed boots designed to look like the aforementioned Chuck Talyors, Beast Boy has sneakers with animal-print soles, and even Cyborg has some pretty cool-looking feet. Glen Murakami had this to say on the character designs:

"I just didn't want them super-buff like the Justice League characters. I wanted them to have a clumsy quality about them. And like all teenagers, they would really be into footwear. Big clod-hopper shoes. That's why I gave [Robin] the metal [steel-toe] combat boots."

1. ↑ And Rulue gets angry because of this.