Champagne Heels on a Burlesque Stage
Chappell Roan brought her Super Graphic Spectacular to the Shrine Theater in Los Angeles wearing Jimmy Choo Vanessa pumps in a champagne metallic finish – a shoe choice that held its own against some of the most theatrically constructed stage costumes seen at a pop show this year. The performance wasn’t just a concert; it was a full visual production, and every element of the look was calibrated to match that energy.
She wore multiple burlesque-inspired ensembles throughout the night.
The Vanessa pump from Jimmy Choo is a pointed-toe stiletto with a slim heel – built for visual impact rather than practicality, which made it an entirely appropriate choice for a show designed around spectacle. The champagne colorway, which reads as a warm metallic gold under stage lighting, added a glow to each costume change rather than competing with the elaborate silhouettes she moved through. It’s a shoe that disappears into the fantasy while still registering as a deliberate decision.
What the Jimmy Choo Vanessa Says About Roan’s Footwear Direction
The Vanessa pump sits in Jimmy Choo’s core lineup – a style that carries the house’s signature aesthetic of polished femininity without veering into overtly trendy territory. Roan’s selection of the champagne shade specifically reflects an understanding of how footwear reads on stage: neutral enough to pair across costume changes, metallic enough to catch light and register from the back of a theater like the Shrine. A flat or a platform would have told a different story entirely.
Burlesque as a visual reference has a long footwear history – the genre practically built itself around the stiletto heel, the ankle strap, the satin finish. Roan’s use of Jimmy Choo within that framework connects the reference to a contemporary luxury context, updating the aesthetic without stripping it of its theatrical roots. The choice signals that she and her styling team are thinking about footwear as costume, not just as an accessory layered on top of one.
What makes the Vanessa pump work specifically here is its restraint. Roan’s stage persona leans into maximalism – big hair, constructed bodices, dramatic makeup – and a more embellished heel would have created noise at the bottom of the frame rather than grounding it. The champagne metallic reads as a finish line on each look, something the eye can settle on before moving back up through the rest of the silhouette.
The Shrine Theater as a Setting for This Kind of Dressing
The Shrine Theater in Los Angeles is not an intimate venue. Its scale demands a visual language that holds from a distance, which puts pressure on every styling decision, including shoes. A heel that photographs well in a close-up but disappears in a wide shot isn’t doing its job at a venue like this. The Jimmy Choo Vanessa’s pointed toe and metallic finish solve that problem – the silhouette is clean enough to read at distance, and the champagne color catches the stage lighting in a way that matte finishes simply don’t.
The Super Graphic Spectacular as a show title already announces its own intentions – this is a production where visual language is the point, not a backdrop to the music.
Los Angeles audiences and the photographers who cover shows there are attuned to styling in a way that markets outside the fashion industry epicenters sometimes aren’t. When a performer chooses footwear as deliberately as Roan did at the Shrine – maintaining the same Jimmy Choo style across multiple costume changes rather than switching shoes with each look – it registers as a styling philosophy rather than a one-off decision. That consistency is its own kind of statement. It suggests the shoes were part of the concept from the beginning, not fitted in at the last stage of production.
The Super Graphic Spectacular ran at Los Angeles’s Shrine Theater with Chappell Roan moving through several burlesque-constructed looks, each anchored by the same champagne Jimmy Choo Vanessa pump – a repetition that, by the final costume change, had turned a shoe into a signature.
