CHANHASSEN, Minn. – Before I begin, I want to make one thing clear: You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a grown man panting in front of a giant wall of high heels. Not just any heels. Stiletto heels, made to measure for a size 7 feet. Ankle boots covered with fabric mainly, but also waders, waders and platforms, in bright colors like Oz.

Male, female, black, white, young, old – everyone visiting “The Beautiful Collection: Prince’s Custom Shoes” in Paisley Park on a recent tour on Saturday went gaga on Prince Rogers Nelson’s heels. Over 300 pairs, soles cleaned, fabrics sucked, forms padded and lit from behind, delivering us gender norms and pandemic loungewear.

Listen ! Here are the hand painted cloud boots from the “Raspberry Beret” music video; the platform roller skates documented by Questlove and discovered posthumously in a bespoke case; and ankle boots with metallic stickers proclaiming “Get Wild” on the toe and “Free Music” on the heel. (Prince wore this pair in 1995 to protest Warner Bros., whose recording contracts he found so abusive that he temporarily changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol.)

One pair was covered in candle wax. (The prince loved candles.) Another hid the scuff marks with the pink magic marker. Several pairs had friction burns from Prince’s legendary dance.

“If there’s a stain or scuff, it should stay on the shoe,” said Mitch Maguire, curator of the show, on a humid afternoon. “It’s part of its history.

The artist’s estate, which took over the management of Paisley Park in 2019, manages tours of the resort, which Prince built in 1987. Photos and videos are not permitted, as are tours of “The Beautiful Collection “, a limited edition exhibition open to the public. public in July as part of the wider Paisley Park tour, are limited to 15 minutes.

More than 900 additional pairs of heels discovered at Paisley remain in storage, although Maguire said he hopes to display them over time. The aftermath of wearing only high heels for four decades, including a reported hip operation and well-documented opioid use that led to Prince’s fatal overdose in 2016, are also missed from the tour. .

Instead, visitors are treated – and it’s a treat – nose-to-glass close-ups of exquisite bespoke designs from artisans such as Willie Rivera, Franco Puccetti, Cos Kyriacou, Andre Rostomyan and Gary Kazanchyan from André n ° 1, as well as filmed interviews with Kyriacou and Kazanchyan. Between them, the two have built over 3,000 pairs of custom heels for Prince, including bright Lucite platform sneakers and heeled ankle boots for arena shows.

Yet even the reinforcements – in this case, a metal clip bolting the heel to the sole – were not enough to allow Prince’s shoemakers to attend concerts in peace.

“There were times my heart was in my mouth,” Kyriacou said in an interview with the exhibit. “He was a relentless performer.”

Building dangerously high heels embellished enough for the artist’s taste, but secure enough for his talent, required ingenuity and engineering. After all, Prince stomped on his heels – 4 inches high in the early years, 3 1/4 inches later. He turned and strutted and sashayed. It swayed, hopped, and slipped through the cracks so fast that unreinforced heels sometimes snapped off like a triangle.

Over time, designers have refined the reinforced heel and played with its angle. Kyriacou worked with Donatella Versace to develop the famous Versace fabric heels. (The label was the only one Prince wore outside of his custom designs.)

Creating a literal head-to-toe look with custom fabrics – his heels were usually covered in the same material as his costumes – is arguably Prince’s most memorable contribution to rock’n’roll fashion. The goal wasn’t to make the musician 5-foot-2 taller, said costume designer Helen Hiatt, who ran Prince’s wardrobe department from 1985 to 1991, but to create a look in which shoes “would not cut your eyes”.

Gwen Leeds, a stylist who worked for Prince in several capacities from 1983 to 1988, remembers flying to New York City to buy fabric from upscale stores on West 57th Street and taking it to TO Dey on the 46th Street to have the shoes personalized. built and covered.

“Normally you buy fabric by the yard,” she said. “In the purple world, it was done by the pound.”

Money was not an object, but time often was. Leeds’ instructions from Prince’s wardrobe department? “Ask them to do whatever is necessary” to meet the deadline. This once meant outbidding reps for Luther Vandross and Queen Elizabeth to get the fabric that became Prince’s 1985 Oscar set, which HER recently paid homage to.

“I said, ‘Well, I represent Prince, and I have the money,” Leeds said. “I have the fabric.”

Necessity, of course, is the mother of invention. Kazanchyan recalled buying, demolishing and rebuilding a pair of Fendi shoes in two weeks to match Prince’s foot pattern. Hiatt attached metal bat wings to Prince’s toe area with double-sided tape to create his now-legendary Batman boots. She once even melted plexiglass in her oven to satisfy a last minute request for a glitter cane.

“You just used all the ingenuity you could find,” Hiatt said.

Yet when she tried to invent a new tip on Prince’s shoe pattern, widening the box to avoid bunions, Prince refused.

“’You know I hate arguing,” she recalls telling him, staring at the floor. “Go change it. My heart ached for his little feet.

Onions apparently didn’t matter in the purple world, nor did budgets. And although this purple world is not the real world, “The Beautiful Collection” reveals the benefits of an alternate reality. Because here an androgynous black man represents the pinnacle of sex appeal, straight white couples go ooh and aah to platform flip flops, and a tailor-made shoemaker will buy a pair of children’s shoes from Payless, rip off the bright soles and fit them in. in white platform sneakers so that every time a rock legend presses a piano pedal, his heels light up like a happy tinkerbell.

And if there is any skepticism about the purple world, this celebration of the show, turn your gaze to the Paisley parking lot, 19 miles from George Floyd Square, where a group of black motorcyclists, engines on fire, rush on “When Doves Cry ”in total. strangers dance.