in her shoes; Muse, mother, and designer, Jacqueline Schnabel is making great strides with her latest venture: elegant but easy-on-the-wallet footwear.

Byline: Florence Kane

It's a given that on any given Saturday in SoHo, in the A.P.C. store on Mercer Street, the throngs of tourists and hipper 20-something New Yorkers are wholly unaware that the rough-hewn floorboards creaking beneath them as they consider appealing little shifts and dark denims are hallowed downtown ground. It was here that Jacqueline Schnabel opened the New York outpost of Azzedine Alaia in 1988. It was here her former husband, the artist Julian Schnabel, placed sculptures around the sales floor and created the velvet dressing-room curtains. The landmark store closed in 1991, but thus did Jacqueline, now 49, dive into the fashion world.

Schnabel shifted into actual design in the mid-nineties. Her first projects were runaway kits called Minigirl that had the perfect pieces for a quick getaway: a bodysuit, wrap skirt, dress, and bikini in one; pants, shorts, a bikini, and a T-shirt in another; and a third with lingerie-style party looks. "People thought, How can you go out in a nightgown?" Schnabel says, recalling those days before the dawn of slip dressing. "But you could! Now everybody goes out in a nightgown." (The kits, she confides, were partly inspired by The Lonely Doll, by Dare Wright, and partly "a reaction to having kids and having this routine.")

And then two and a half years ago, she launched a shoe collection, which came to be after Schnabel had some shoes made for herself at a factory in Argentina. Christiane Celle, who owns the chain of Calypso stores, saw them, loved them, and asked Schnabel to make a collection for her boutiques. The Jacqueline Schnabel shoe colors are bright-crimson suede for a bowed bootie, rainbow anaconda-printed suede on a bamboo platform-and Schnabel calls them "all-day shoes" because they are chic but comfortable enough to wear not just running errands around town but dancing the night away (which the designer has a keen sense of, having spent many an evening at Studio 54 and the Mudd Club back in the day). The line is also sold at Satine in Los Angeles, No. 6 and Bergdorf Goodman in New York, ...