scaling new heights; Parisian cobbler Pierre Hardy is taking the art of shoe design to an elevated position.

Byline: Mark Holgate

ierre Hardy ticked off a long to-do list on his last visit to New York: the Museum of Modern Art-check; Iris Apfel at the Costume Institute-check; lunch at Cafe Gray, dinner at La Esquina, a Richard Avedon retrospective-check, check, check. Then Hardy, the Parisian shoe designer, decided to drop by Hermes, for whom he designs shoes and jewels in tandem with his own celebrated shoe line and more shoes for Balenciaga. "Just to see if anyone recognizes me," he said with a wry wink, a gesture that implied "As if!" In a few short moments, however, he had indeed been recognized-by the doorman, by a sales associate trailing after a customer sporting a Stetson and the biggest Birkin in existence, and by a table of tourists poring over a Cape Cod watch who smiled at him in unison.

The Hermes trip wasn't meant to be an ego massage; being the center of attention is actually anathema to Hardy. But he's learning to live with it. This spring's Pierre Hardy line is the perfect exemplar of why he's worthy of all the fuss that's been foisted on him: The sizable-strapped sandals, the erotically curved peep-toe pumps, the simple, almost naive flats are familiar from past collections, but right now they seem an exact distillation of the discreet, adult glamour that's striking such a chord now throughout fashion.

As he wandered through the Iris Apfel exhibit at the Met, it wasn't her collection of outrageous vintage pieces from couture's outer limits that excited him but a gilt Courreges belt that looked like a ceinture-size cuff: ornate yet severe, futuristic yet ancient. "When I started out, whatever I did had to be pure, conceptual, no concessions," he says, taking the example of this wild belt from the sixties space-race designer. "After a while I noticed that women wanted to wear Yves Saint Laurent, not Courreges. They preferred to walk with shoes, not concepts, on their feet."

Hardy still likes to push it, though. This season's monumental mirror heels could be interpreted as a neat little joke on narcissism; the boots in the batik fabrics he bought on a vacation to Bali back in 1987 could have been constructed ...