There are shoes - the wear-on-your-feet, keep-your-toes-dry, work-appropriate shoes - and then there are shoes. Mouth-watering designs in colors that pop on shoes that you never want to take off your feet even when your toes are threatening to break off from the rest of your body. Natalie Portman has made such a shoe-line, but they will comfort your toes as well as your eyes and will soothe – get this – your conscience. This is a vegan shoe-line our actress-extraordinaire has dreamed up, and it will blow you away.

First, however, let’s look at why a vegan shoe line would hold such appeal. Maybe you finally did it. You made the decision to start living your life in a more ecologically-sound manner. You are walking to the public transportation of your choice to get to work, you are no longer running the water for the entire time you brush your teeth and you are taking shorter showers. You’ve even tackled your diet – trying to eat less beef, thus doing your part in not feeding the beef conglomerates so much of you hard-earned cash. Perhaps you’ve even decided to go all the way and become a vegetarian or a vegan. Congratulations all around!

However, as Natalie has proven, the world of veganism and vegetarianism is not a world that is restricted solely to food. Granted, this is the most common area in which people make the change in their lives – to go either vegan or vegetarian in what they consume on a daily basis. This is the part of the social consciousness wherein veganism or vegetarianism is the most obvious, as it is in the company of others that an individuals’ food choices inevitably are examined or questioned.

The eating habits are a hard change to make – perhaps harder even than taking shorter showers or using less gasoline in your single-person car – because after having grown up with certain foods or meals, you develop a relationship with those things. They are a part of your history, identity, a way that a habit of long showers simply does not compare. You are not a bad person if you love hamburgers and hate the thought of giving them up. I promise that you can still do your part for the betterment of the ecology of this earth if you just change the sorts of clothes you purchase.

Oh, I hear you fashionistas of the world. “Ecologically-sound clothing” exists in the same realm as hairy armpits and those so-called Jesus sandals. Perhaps that was true once, such thinking is no longer the case. That little pixie Portman has seen to that. And yes, fashionistas, I am aware that Portman was not the first and that Ms. Stella McCartney has been producing animal-friendly high-fashion for years now. However, my fiercely well-heeled divas, few of us can afford the wares that the McCartney house peddles. It is to our rescue that Natalie Portman’s shoe line, Natalie Portman for Te Casan, comes.

A breath of fresh air in the revolving door of Hollywood “It” girls, Natalie Portman has long possessed the self-assurance and confidence that has set her aside from her peers into a more specialized realm. She has cemented this position with the development of a vegan shoe line. The line arrived in February of 2008 online and in the New York City boutique, and already fans of these shoes are growing. Because they are as chic as they are animal-friendly, the shoes in this line offer the sort of conscious-calming purchasing power that all shoppers – fashionista, career-woman or fashionable mother alike – will take comfort in.

After all, Natalie Portman herself is not a vegan in terms of how she lives her life, but she does make it a point to not purchase clothing that has harmed an animal in its production. Such is how this shoe line came to be. Even running around $200 a pop, TeCaran’s offering of Natalie Portman’s designs are significantly cheaper than that other high-end design line. So treat yourself to some truly innovative fashion.
Find Natalie Portman for Te Casan at TeCasan.com, http://www.tecasan.com/,  and at the store’s New York City boutique which is located at 382 West Broadway.