make something beautiful with someone you don't know yet

Vio’s weird shoes

The most common thing for someone to say to me at a milonga is “you can’t dance in those shoes”. About 5 minutes later, they realize they’re wrong.

When I started dancing, one of the main attractions was the chance to dress up often, including high heels. Since I was about 14 I’ve had more high heels than places to wear them. When I finally started dancing tango, of course I’d wear the most fabulous shoes I could find. These turned out to be 6”/15cm heels with 2″/5cm platforms covered in glitter. I felt great in those shoes.

Four years later, I took my first trip to Buenos Aires. Concerned to appear respectful, I bought my first pair of actual tango shoes. I called these shoes my “flats”.  As always in flat shoes, I felt decidedly unsexy. When I stepped onto the dance floor in these I felt like I was wearing house slippers. I got a bit conformist when I went to Argentina, and I regret it.

On that trip I visited every tango shoe store, just to ask if they would do custom shoes with platforms, and how high. The best offer I got was a meager 1 cm, about 1/6 what I was used to.

As a leader, I find that shoes with a lot of elasticity in the sole, like thick boots, work very well for me and I can follow in them as well. These days in Argentina a lot of dancers are using rubber soles. Certain kinds of rubber give you strength and still pivot well.

I encourage my students to experiment with shoes, because some followers dance so much better in flats than heels, but they don’t know until they try. For everyone, I recommend avoiding expensive and unfashionable dance shoes, buying normal shoes they find attractive and having the soles re-done if necessary. Shoemakers can even build you a mixed sole, with the pivot area in one material and the outer edge in another.

I also believe that tango needs to be more contemporary and fashionable so it doesn’t get stuck as a cliché and relic. I want people to dance, so I want tango to appear as relevant to a lot of different cultural contexts.

Here’s a basic guide to choosing shoes for tango.

Here’s my history of shoes

Style Guides

  • tango clothing for men and women is coming soon! International shopping for the most elegant and sexy tango clothes is about to happen right here.
[wysija_form id="3"]
  • In the interim, I recommending a few designers and shops that I love, and curating their collections just for you.

Curated

Themes

Posts by Email

Chronological

All the Blog Posts Ever

The Berlin Interviews

Frustrated?

Guides

More Guides...

Log In