24 years after Paul Simon sang about having ‘Diamonds on the soles of her shoes’, life is set to imitate art.

An Italian shoe manufacturer has taken Simon’s lyrics seriously and developed a method for coating soles of shoes with tiny diamonds, or fragments of diamonds at any rate.

Shoes: image by Zappos

Sciocco Scarpa, a shoe manufacturer based just outside of Verona, claims that the diamonds add more than a touch of glamour to their shoes: they improve grip and increase the life of a pair of shoes because the soles don’t wear out so fast.

“We asked women what would improve expensive designer Italian shoes, and they told us that they got frustrated when soles wore out before the shoes had gone out of fashion,” said Fabio Buffano, design director at Sciocco Scarpa, “so we looked for a way to make our soles walk further, and what better to turn to than the hardest substance known to man – diamonds.”

Sciocco Scarpa said that they had two specific markets in mind for their blinged-up long-life shoes.

The first target market is celebrities on the red carpet. “These women – Hollywood actresses and the like – are the ultimate in glamour, and they spend so much time walking up and down red carpets collecting awards, ” commented Buffano, “and that can be really tough on the shoes. Models have the same issue: up and down catwalks every day, and you know those catwalks are made to be really hard-wearing, so the poor shoes suffer horribly.”

The other key target customer for diamond shoes is shoppers in upmarket shopping districts such as Bond Street in London and the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Buffano again: “These women pound the pavements of those high class shopping streets relentlessly, often carrying heavy shopping which just adds to the load on their shoes, so they want shoes that will last but also something with a bit of sparkle, a bit of glamour… diamonds are perfect!“.

Sciocco Scarpa added that they have spent much of the winter testing out their diamond-soled shoes in key locations, including the red carpets of the awards season and Europe’s leading shopping districts. In their tests the shoes proved to be a sparkling success, gripping icy pavements without any slippage and wearing exceptionally well.

Pressed for any disadvantages to their new diamond soled shoes, Buffano conceded, “well, they’re quite expensive, and they can play havoc with sensitive flooring at home or in the historical palaces of Florence“.