At the launch of Old Navy's collaboration with designer Christopher John Rogers, Gayle King’s footwear was more than an accessory; it was a historical footnote. Her Brian Atwood pumps—a vivid composition of acid-lime, orange, aqua, and hot-pink suede—did not merely complement Rogers’s rainbow-knit set. They distilled its exuberant color logic into a single, potent form. This instinct to use lingerie-adjacent design principles—the strategic reveal of the foot, the harness-like ankle strap—for bold, public expression has deep roots. Atwood’s own brand, founded in the late 1990s, emerged from an era where shoe design began borrowing overtly from the structural daring and fetish aesthetics previously confined to the boudoir.
King’s entire ensemble, a masterclass in controlled vibrancy, reflects a broader shift. The collaboration itself, Old Navy’s second designer capsule after a 2023 tie-up with Anna Sui—a designer deeply versed in vintage lingerie detailing—signals a democratization of high-concept color blocking. King’s recent sartorial choices, from coordinated looks with Oprah Winfrey at Parisian shows to this New York event, suggest a consistent thesis: color is a serious language. The clean lines of her skirt and top provided the perfect canvas, allowing the architectural shoe to speak. In the archives of The Lingerie Museum, we see this same intentionality in a 1930s Schiaparelli shocking-pink corset or a 1960s Courrèges space-age bodysuit—garments that understood color as structure, not just decoration. King’s pumps, in their brilliant condensation of a collection’s ethos, continue that conversation.
Originally reported by WWD