British designer Debbie Wingham, which has a record of diamond-encrusted, over-the-top creations, has done it again: Late in October, Wingham unveiled her latest masterpiece – a pair of shoes priced at a record-shattering $15.1 million.
Diamonds and Gold at Your Feet
The shoes, commissioned by an unnamed client for a woman’s 30th birthday, “are perfectly symmetrical and feature extremely rare large pink and blue diamonds […]”, worth more than $13 million, according to a press release. This includes two 3-carat pink diamonds worth $4.4 million each and two 1-carat blue diamonds valued at $1.9 million each.
All diamonds are set in platinum and the zips and the plaque underneath the shoes are solid gold. The shoes are stitched using 18-karat gold thread and the leather coating process was painted in 24-karat gold paint.
The design of the shoes, which Wingham says “took hundreds of man hours to put together”, was a collaboration between Wingham and Florida-based artist Chris Campbell, who specializes in creating shoes inspired by cakes and fancy buns. Debbie contributed the ideas while Campbell himself made the shoes.
The Million Dollar Artist
According to Wingham, the design used traditional cake artistry. This is not incidental. One of Wingham’s earlier creations was the world’s most expensive cake, sold to a client in Dubai for $75 million. The cake took more than 1,100 hours to make, with tiny edible figurines hand-sculpted with Wingham’s couture clothing and accessories. The cake had 4,000 diamonds, including a 5.2-carat pink diamond, a 6.4-carat yellow diamond and 15 five-carat white diamonds. Those 17 stones alone are worth more than $45 million.
She also previously designed the world’s most expensive black diamond dress, valued at $5.7 million, and the world’s most expensive red diamond Abaya, valued at $17 million.
