This is an edited excerpt of my conversation with Marina Larroudé for the Back Row podcast. You can watch or listen to the full episode on  YouTube,  Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss new episodes. If you like the pod, please leave a rating and a review, which takes ten seconds and really helps other people find this independent show.

Marina Larroudé started her shoe company Larroudé on December 1, 2020. It was the middle of the pandemic. After working at Condé Nast for around 12 years, as fashion director at Style.com and then Teen Vogue, she worked as fashion director of Barneys, where she saw the gap between what women were being sold and what they wanted to buy. Larroudé was her idea for bridging that gap in footwear. “I spent so much of my time — 20 years — listening to the designers being like, ‘I was really inspired by Hawaii.’ And I was like, ‘How is that going to translate into a woman who has a party in Connecticut?’”

She and her husband took money out of their 401(k)s to bootstrap the business. Since Covid vaccines weren’t yet widely available, other shoe companies were canceling orders, allowing factories time to work on Larroudé. “We launched with sandals and pumps — and people weren't even leaving the house,” she said. The assortment included printed, whimsical shoes. When the vaccine came along in the spring, “There was revenge shopping,” she recalled. “We basically did not sell any black shoes that entire year. We sold everything printed and everything fun… People were home for a year. They didn't want to buy a black sandal. They wanted to buy a purple sandal.” Her top sellers today are still pretty whimsical — including boat shoes; fuzzy-lined ballet flats; the platform sandals Taylor Swift wore in her Eras tour; and sneakers.

As a direct-to-consumer company, Larroudé was able to bypass the “fashion system” — runway shows, wholesale accounts, appeasing traditional gatekeepers — that is routinely critiqued as broken today. And it’s grown to be a multi-million-dollar business that employs more than 600 people. I talked to Marina about working under Anna Wintour; what she makes of critiques of the enduring fashion system; what “luxury” means in 2026; and much more.

You used to work in the world of The Devil Wears Prada. Did you see The Devil Wears Prada 2 trailer?

Yes.

Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz, who once worked in a fashion closet, previously came on the Back Row podcast and made the point that that world of magazines is dead and has been dead for nearly two decades now. Why do you think people are still so fascinated by it? And should we be?

Anna, for me, was the first women in a career who was considered tough. And she's not even tough if you see what goes on in banking, Silicon Valley. I think she set a different example in the creative world of professionalism, and that made people very curious.

I was listening to a podcast from Michelle Obama and she was like, no matter how hard I was working, and all her education, all the newspapers were really talking about what she was wearing. Ultimately, fashion plays such a role within everyone's lives. And there is something very mysterious about those big editors that fascinates people.

What did you learn as a market editor at Style.com and later fashion director of Teen Vogue?

Professionalism. Team effort. It sounds so dumb now, but I remember we really wanted to feature a Prada shoe and they're like, No, Vogue has an exclusive. So, a lot of negotiating skills.

It was a lot of going to the designers, selecting the best merchandise for the audience, and showing it on Style.com. A big part of my role back then was accessories. The “Accessories Index” showcased accessories from a lot of brands. When I started, it was 20 designers. When I left, it was over 200 designers.

When we featured someone back then on the website — this is prior to Instagram — you could really change designers’ lives.

At that time in the internet, we weren’t all thinking about SEO or shareable content — it was more about our editorial instincts versus being so prescribed like it is today. And brands were wary of copycats, so they were less amenable to having their shows published online, but Anna helped convince them to do it.

When I was starting the Accessories Index, Chanel would be like, I'm sending you three bags. That's all you can feature. And we're like, But there are 200 handbags in the collection. And they would be like, No.

I remember when Celine did furry sandals, like Birkenstocks, back in the day. The collection was on Style.com, shots of the shoes were on Style.com, so everyone could see them. I posted a screenshot of those on Instagram and then Celine called the office to be like, She needs to remove that picture. And I was like, Guys, it's online. There was so much resistance, especially from the big houses, to not have their products featured on the website. But since I was there for 10 years, at the end, everyone really embraced it.

And what did you learn as fashion director of Barneys?

I was selecting the best looks to be in the catalogs. One dress I selected — it still haunts me. It was the most beautiful dress in the collection and we didn't sell it.

It was a gorgeous Altuzarra purple dress with embroidery. He's my friend, and I love his pieces no matter what. We probably had to buy three dresses. The dress was all handmade, beautifully done. And it was very expensive.

But, who is the woman who is going to buy this? How old is she? How skinny does she need to be? Does she have $10,000 to drop on it it? Because at end of the day, if it is a dress that only a beautiful, 30-year-old woman can wear and would wear, who also has $10,000, you tell me who that is.

That, for me, was a very good learning experience. At Teen Vogue, I could select that gorgeous dress, put it on the cover, and then my job would be done. And in my job at Barneys, it was to put a dress on the cover of the catalog that would translate to sales.

Luxury fashion retail is not doing well. Saks filed for bankruptcy, Ssense filed for bankruptcy — Farfetch has had problems. Could you see this from the inside, and is that why you left retail?

After Barneys, I spent six months at a Brazilian footwear company. I was fired for the first time in my career. It was the beginning of the pandemic.

I remember reading Tory Burch’s story — she said that when she was on maternity leave, she took a step out of the industry and realized what was missing. And I was like, One day, I'll have that moment, and whenever I do, I'll know what to do.

During the pandemic, I couldn’t freelance. But I saw a white space for footwear. I saw a lot of DTC brands. My friends were pivoting in their careers. Meredith [Melling] opening La Ligne or the girls at Dôen. But in shoes, the last designer that I remember doing anything like that was Aquazurra back in the day, and it wasn't DTC.

The footwear industry is so dormant. It's very hard to produce a shoe, so there’s less newness. I had spent a lot of time on the Barneys shoe floor. I saw a disconnect between what women were looking at, and what designers were putting out there.

What did people want that was not there?

Women would love the Balenciaga pink boot. But then they're like, If I'm gonna pay $2,000, I'm going to buy the black version. The notion to buy a fashion product was there.

I saw a lot of women looking for great, comfortable black sandals. They also didn't want to spend $1,000, because if they're going to spend $1,000, they're going to buy something very specific from Louboutin or the Rockstud from Valentino or the Origami from Prada. They don't have $10,000 to buy every single thing.

High-low only exists because if we could afford [everything], we'd be high-high. You’d walk into Bergdorf, get a black Chanel sandal — done. But the reality is we're all making choices. We want to travel. We want to buy a nice shoe. We want to buy a nice bag. You could have a tremendous career in New York City and not afford a $1,000 shoe. So I saw this tremendous disconnect. At the time, there was Amina Mouaddi’s crystal shoes and I was like, I love them, but then you need a shoe for drop off.

You said in a past interview you don't like to use the word “luxury.” Why?

For me, it's so obnoxious.