17
The Search for Ruby Slippers
Christian Louboutin pump
May 24, 2000: New York
As overall shoe consciousness reached new, unprecedented levels, a classic, covetable pump appeared back on the scene. On a spring morning in Midtown, a pair of authentic ruby slippers went up for auction at Christie’s East in New York: the ones originally owned by Memphis-based contest winner Roberta Jeffries Bauman since the 1940s, until she let them go in the late 1980s. Her pair was about to change hands for the second time, but another set of slippers was safely ensconced in public view. In 1979, the anonymous bidder who bought his ruby slippers at the MGM auction donated them to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., where they continue to sparkle in the Icons of American Culture exhibition, alongside Kermit the Frog, Oscar the Grouch, Jack Dempsey’s and Joe Louis’s boxing gloves, and Apolo Ohno’s speed skates. Displayed in a Plexiglas case against a piece of the original yellow brick road, they’re positioned to be the first thing one sees upon entering the room, and visitors come to pay homage to Dorothy’s shoes in such incredible numbers that the patch of carpet in front of them has been replaced several times.
Thanks to Kent Warner’s discovery of multiple sets of Dorothy’s shoes in the MGM warehouses back in the 1970s, there are four pairs of “original” ruby slippers floating through the annals of the collecting world, with rumors of more being peddled in the underground circuit. The morning of the Christie’s auction, David Elkouby—a Los Angeles native whose impressive private memorabilia collection fills five thousand square feet of warehouse space, and includes Batman’s and Robin’s costumes from the 1960s television show, Charlton Heston’s robes from The Ten Commandments, and a fair share of Marilyn Monroe’s costumes—arrived in New York with modest expectations. Among the scores of collectors and enthusiasts, he registered for his paddle. “Someone at the auction had said that, supposedly, Bill Gates was on the phone,” he says of that day, “and if Bill Gates was on the phone, we had no chance.” The bidding, a mesmerizing, repetitive rumble, commenced, and potential buyers no longer concerned themselves with eyeballing the competition. The gavel fell in Elkouby’s favor, which to him felt like a stroke of dumb luck: “For whatever reason [at auctions]—and I have to say, it’s happened a couple of times—you’re sitting there in the audience, and you’re looking at something, and you blank for a second, and that’s what happened to this person on the phone! And then they’re like, OK, sold, and pow, we got them! And I never thought we were gonna get ’em. I really—I thought, we didn’t have a shot. And it worked out.”
David Elkouby and his partners won the shoes for a final purchase price of $666,000: a fantastical amount to a disinterested party, but appropriate, if not a bargain, to those invested in the ruby slippers’ legend. The ruby slippers “are the Holy Grail of prop collecting,” Elkouby explains, while Michael Siewart, owner of the largest private collection of Judy Garland memorabilia and proprietor of JudyGarland.com, compares the ruby slippers to “a rare jewel,” that harks back to a different, more innocent time, before issues in politics and religion became so relentlessly divisive. Cathy Elkies, senior vice president at Christie’s New York and director of Iconic Collections, maintains that in the scheme of Hollywood props, the only ones to come close to the ruby slippers’ historical and sentimental value would be Rosebud—the sled from Citizen Kane—and the Maltese falcon: both pieces that, like the slippers, function in classic films as pivotal plot points. Dorothy’s shoes, she says, “are one of the most recognizable symbols of film history, and [given] their value—which obviously has gone up over the years—it doesn’t mean that just anybody can play.” In other words, not every film buff and Wizard of Oz enthusiast has three-quarters of a million dollars lying around to purchase his or her own pair of ruby slippers. The higher the price they command at auction, the more special and celebrated they seem.
And celebrated they are: In 2008, a group of the world’s most respected footwear designers like Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin, Roger Vivier, Sergio Rossi, Stuart Weitzman, and Jimmy Choo submitted one-of-a-kind updated versions of the ruby slippers, to be exhibited at Saks Fifth Avenue during Fall Fashion Week and then to be auctioned for the benefit of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. The lot garnered $25,000 at a Wizard of Oz seventieth anniversary party hosted at Manhattan’s Tavern on the Green. There are Web sites, Facebook pages, fan clubs, and even eBay stores devoted to Dorothy’s shoes—all signs that ruby slippers fever isn’t anywhere near breaking.
Elkouby is banking on that momentum. He’s a businessman: a collector who is not only passionate about Hollywood memorabilia but also a realist who understands that the ruby slippers, like a competitive piece of real estate, should ultimately yield a considerable profit. He claims that he’d like to display them one day, but for the moment they’re locked away in a vault, exhibited once a year to the insurance company representatives who come to check up on their own risky bet. If the past is to be trusted, Elkouby and his partners will have no trouble recovering the amount they paid and then some, which is impressive, given that the slippers, unlike a sturdy high-rise, weren’t built to last, and they aren’t getting any younger. That said, the cultural connection to the ruby slippers has never been entirely rational. There’s the growing fetishization of “old Hollywood glamour” and the sense that Judy Garland’s legacy becomes more powerful with each passing day. And then there’s the magic of shoes in general, defined in fairy tales of yesteryear and constantly adapting to fit our shifting values. Even if the ruby slippers turn dusty and dull, shoes continue to shimmer in the collective imagination. As more footwear options present themselves—in stores, online, on blogs, in the streets—the search continues for that perfect, transformative pair that, when slipped onto a worthy foot, will bring out the very best in the wearer.
Just as the real-life ruby slippers did, that perfect, aspirational pair continued to get more expensive. The new millennium—up until the Wall Street crash of 2008, anyway—saw an economic boom that enabled the triumph of an ubiquitous celebrity culture, in which stars turned into walking, talking commercials for their favorite brands. As consumers, with the help of the Internet, became increasingly knowledgeable about fashion, It Girls like Kate Moss, Sienna Miller, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Blake Lively, and Alexa Chung could change a designer’s fortunes just by mentioning his or her name. While the couture runways have long been the stomping ground of the elite, virtual access to the shows via style Web sites has demystified the fashion world, democratizing it in an altogether new way. Though in most cases designer price tags remain prohibitive, accessories like shoes offer an entry point, so that average buyers don’t feel like they’re on the outside, just pressing their faces up against the window. A couture gown will likely always be out of the question, but one can imagine saving up for a pair of high-end strappy sandals.
This past decade saw the meteoric rise of Paris Hilton: a young woman (with a little dog too) set to inherit an estimated $30 million of her family’s hotel fortune, and who made no apologies for her sense of entitlement. “There’s nobody in the world like me,” Paris announced in 2006. “I think every decade has an iconic blonde—like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana—and right now, I am that icon.” Elliot Mintz, her onetime publicist, described Paris’s inimitable quality as “the light,” suggesting that the public was merely picking up on something intrinsically and objectively spectacular about her. Light notwithstanding, she also arrived on the scene at a time when her uninhibited lifestyle—both economically and otherwise—was particularly appealing to her fans. Paris admitted that she had trouble buying high-end shoes, but not because she couldn’t afford them: “I desperately hate one thing about my body. I have size 11 feet. Yeah, it sucks, because I see all these super cute shoes in the stores: Guccis, YSLs, Manolos. And when they bring them out in my size, they look like clown shoes.” Of course, that didn’t stop her from walking into Patricia Field’s boutique in New York City, eyeing a pair of $1,000 pumps, and then convincing the saleswoman to give her the shoes—which she could obviously afford—gratis, “because once I wear them, you know that they are going to be in all the magazines and everyone is going to write about them.”
In 2008, trend forecaster Irma Zandl affirmed that marketing had become increasingly celebrity driven and that consumers gravitate toward brands that their favorite stars endorse. Endorsements can be formal—the star is paid to be a spokesperson for a brand or, as a thank-you to a designer for allowing her to borrow or even keep an article of clothing, she makes explicit reference to their name on the red carpet or in an interview—or informal, which can mean anything from her character wearing a certain brand on-screen, to being photographed on the street wearing an item that she has purchased or been gifted by the designer in the hopes of increasing the brand’s visibility. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a trend in magazines such as InStyle emerged to dissect celebrity outfits, thus increasing readers’ fashion fluency and consciousness. The Internet makes it even easier for enthusiasts to engage in a what was she wearing?–style dialogue. Suttirat Larlarb, who costumed the colorful, Bollywood-themed film Slumdog Millionaire, recalls that “after Slumdog, I got an e-mail from somebody asking me if I would answer this question for a magazine, which was trying to track down items from films that their readers were interested in buying for themselves, like the yellow scarf [that Freida Pinto’s character Latika] wears at the end. And I wrote back saying, ‘Well, actually, we designed it for the film, it was made by hand, so I don’t know!’ When the print issue came out, I saw they had used my response, which was basically that it was one of a kind, but here are my suggestions for similar things. And when I went online, there was a whole spread of people saying, well, I saw this at Pier 1 imports, and maybe you could do this, and I saw this at the Tahari shop, and all these people trying to help track down look-alike scarves, which I thought was quite interesting.” College friends Hilary Rosenman and Barry Budin, who started their shoe company Madison Harding back in 2007, learned the power of celebrity firsthand after Lindsay Lohan—who was still something of a role model at the time—was photographed wearing their fringed flat sandals. They had been struggling to get their name out, but after InStyle and People magazines ran photographs of the redheaded starlet in their shoes, they sold out their collection to Nordstrom.
No designer has benefited more from the rise of celebrity culture than the current grand homme of the contemporary luxury shoe market: Christian Louboutin. It’s the name on every wide-eyed starlet’s lips. If the ladies at Jimmy Choo proved there was room at the top alongside Blahnik, French designer Louboutin swept in with his $700 heels, raising the bar for exclusivity, opulence, and cutting-edge cachet. As Manolos, thanks to Sex and the City, became increasingly popular (and therefore common), Louboutins filled the void for the latest It shoe that fell painfully—yet tantalizingly—outside of the average woman’s economic reach. Unlike Mellon and Choi, Louboutin rarely gave his shoes away for free, yet his sky-high platform pumps with a signature ruby red sole were wholeheartedly embraced by the kind of trendsetters that other designers have to chase: Naomi Campbell, Lady Gaga, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Angelina Jolie. Jennifer Lopez likes his shoes so much that she released a 2009 single, in anticipation of her upcoming Love? album, called “Louboutins,” in which a mistress gets fed up and steps into her Louboutins, a metaphor for mustering the strength and confidence to leave a cheating man. And in 2010, the unthinkable happened: the Sex and the City franchise shifted its allegiance to Christian Louboutin for the sequel to the first full-length feature, kissing good-bye to Blahnik, who had served over ten years as Carrie Bradshaw’s faithful stiletto supplier.
Mary-Kate Olsen told journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis that Louboutin reminded her of the quintessential fairy-tale cobbler: “When I was on the set of Full House, my favorite story was the Grimms’ fairy tale about a poor shoemaker . . . and when you meet Christian, you realize a man like that really exists.” Louboutin’s own origins are modest yet charmed: he was raised in a working-class neighborhood in Paris with his four sisters, his doting mother, and detached father, and remembers becoming interested in women’s shoes after he spotted a sign with an X’d-out stiletto in front of the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (spike heels damaged the museum’s floors). He received a book about Roger Vivier as a gift, and in pursuit of this new passion approached couture houses until, at age sixteen, he was offered an apprenticeship at the Charles Jourdan* factory in Nice by Dior. Soon he was helping curate a museum retrospective for his idol, Roger Vivier, who was in his seventies at the time. “It was like an angel looked down on me,” he has said. He opened his Paris shop in 1991. The blueprints for Louboutin’s early career may have been written in the stars, but today, the bald-headed designer with an impish grin is attended by an altogether different band of angels: the women who, at the height of a global recession, gladly paid $6,295 for a pair of limited-edition embroidered “Marie Antoinette” pumps. At least part of the reason why wealthy women clamor for his shoes is that as a designer, Louboutin is a bit of a throwback. He owns his own shop, consistently rejecting bids for the business, and designs each and every one of his shoes (which isn’t true at larger houses like Yves Saint Laurent and Dior, where young artists toil under an umbrella label). He doesn’t advertise but is aware that for many of his clients, his shoes represent a substantial purchase, so he’s willing to put in face time with them by way of in-store appearances and private parties.
Also, the significance of the red sole can’t be underestimated. Whereas spotting a Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo (or Nicholas Kirkwood or Pierre Hardy or Loeffler Randall) requires a trained eye, identifying a Louboutin takes just a smidge of pop-culture consciousness. Therefore, almost everyone who walks behind a woman wearing Louboutins will be able to recognize them, associate the shoes with their three- to four-digit price tag, and thus venture to guess at the weight of the wearer’s wallet. “The red sole was absolutely genius,” proclaims Valerie Steele, who makes the point in her book Shoes: A Lexicon of Style that it harks back to “Roman courtesans [who] sometimes had the soles of their sandals engraved so that their footprints read ‘Follow me.’ ” That invitation was clearly sexual, but there’s also historical precedent for soles that convey information about status; in the nineteenth century, Sioux who had the advantage of riding on horseback intricately beaded the soles of their moccasins, which would be visible to those less powerful tribesmen traipsing below. However, Louboutin cites neither example when he describes his eureka moment, which journalists recount in two versions. In the first, a posh couple enters his Paris shop, exactly the kind of people the designer would like to sell to. They appear interested, but then the man lifts a shoe to examine it and, upon flipping it over to look at the sole, replaces it on the shelf in haste. The couple leaves without buying anything, and Louboutin is determined to make his soles more remarkable. In the second story, Louboutin spotted an assistant painting her nails with red polish and imagined how beautiful a varnished coating would look on the underside of his shoes.
Regardless, his choice of red—instead of green or gold, for instance—has distinct erotic appeal. Louboutin told Vanity Fair that the red soles are “a green light,” and it’s clear the sexual implications of his footwear aren’t lost on him: “Half of my women want a shoe to make them look a little tarty, and the other half are big tarts who want a shoe that looks classy. . . . I think in both cases the shoe completes the woman, gives them the element they don’t have in themselves.” Blahnik has been known to speak of his creations in a similar way, pointing out that his shoes bring something valuable to the wearer. And if she tries on a pair and doesn’t recognize the transformation? “If you don’t see the magic,” he told the Guardian, “stick to Reeboks.” The idea being promoted is that Louboutin’s red-soled, towering shoes—or Blahnik’s elegant stilettos—are like contemporary ruby slippers, poised to bring out the best in a woman. That is—if she’s willing to embrace her full potential. If not, she can keep her hard-earned $700 and buy shoes that might make her feel pretty, but won’t—to speak in magazine copy—unleash the goddess.
In September 2010, a London Telegraph article reported on a study done at Northumbria University, in which men were asked to identify whether or not a woman is wearing heels based on her walk. Preliminary results showed that they could not tell the difference. The study made headlines, but despite reports that “men don’t notice women in high heels,” Manolo Blahnik begs to differ. “It’s the height [of the shoes] that gives women that sexy rhythm when they walk—and that’s what men love most. . . . Anyone who says men [don’t notice] must be out of their mind: the first thing that men look at are a woman’s legs, and there is nothing more flattering than high heels. The male reaction to heels is half normal and half perversion, but some men tell me I’ve saved their marriage.”
Still—if men notice a woman in high heels, the implication is that it’s mostly because of the physical effect the shoes have on her body, and not necessarily the design of the shoes themselves. Therefore it stands to reason that if a woman walks confidently in a pair of $70 pumps, they are just as valuable as the $700 ones when it comes to catching a man’s eye. So why buy the Christian Louboutins when Steve Madden is selling similarly proportioned shoes at a fraction of the price? It could be that women are actually dressing to impress one another: their friends and neighbors who also read fashion magazines and style blogs, and who are knowledgeable enough about designers to recognize the difference between a five-inch Chinese Laundry platform pump and the real-deal Jimmy Choo. Luxury shoes are made in Italy, and mass market ones are made in China; the differences in quality are genuine, and it’s often women, not men, who can discern them, particularly because they themselves know how it feels to walk in cheap versus expensive shoes. There’s a competitive aspect to dressing—flaunting one’s fit body or announcing one’s economic status—but there’s also a sense of community that materializes around women who pay attention to trends. Melissa O’Shea, who founded the shoe club Hello Stiletto in 2004, explains that well-shod women enjoy the respect of their peers, who never fail to comment on an eye-catching pair. A Boston native, she started the club after living in London for a spell, where she often had reason to step out in her finest footwear. O’Shea organized a shoe-themed night with her girlfriends, and after it caught on by word of mouth in her hometown, she took Hello Stiletto online. The press paid attention, and by 2010, the club had grown to over 10,000 members.
These days, there are endless resources for the Web-savvy shoe enthusiast, from Sea of Shoes, a popular blog maintained by a teenage Texan with a high-fashion footwear collection, to the Shoe Goddess, an online shoe magazine founded by Florence Azria, wife of designer Serge Azria and an active philanthropist. In December 2007, the century-old shoe company H. H. Brown founded another online shoe magazine called Running with Heels, which features footwear-friendly content as well as lifestyle advice. (H. H. Brown keeps its affiliation very low-key but benefits from overall shoe consciousness and features its brands in periodic giveaways.) Traditional tastemakers like Vogue and Elle have expanded online, but the Internet has also given rise to amateur style bloggers: nonexperts who post photos of their outfits and offer style-related guidance. This has been a boon for affordable, youth-oriented footwear brands like Jeffrey Campbell, Surface to Air, Seychelles, and 80%20, which have all benefited from informal endorsements by the hip, trendy girls who have become role models to women who can afford only so-called fast fashion, from global powerhouses like H&M, Forever 21, Topshop, and Zara. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission decreed that bloggers would be subject to restrictions regarding endorsements and testimonials, forcing them “to disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service,” with an imposed fine of up to $11,000 per post. Before the FTC ruling, bloggers had become powerful enough that they were receiving free samples from shoe and clothing companies. In some cases, bloggers would then feature these items as if they’d been plucked from their own closets. Journalistic ethics aside—some bloggers have complained that the FTC’s decision unfairly targets them, as fashion magazines don’t pay for the clothes, accessories, and products they use in print—the Internet has raised our collective style consciousness and provides readers with new ways to make choices about what they want to wear. There has also been an influx of street style photo-chroniclers, in the mold of Bill Cunningham, who has combed the streets of New York on his bicycle in search of chic city-dwellers for the New York Times for the better part of three decades. Camping out next to the tents at global fashion weeks, as well as at other stylish haunts in major cities, these ad hoc photojournalists chronicle metropolitan fashion and in doing so, ensure that cutting-edge looks quickly spread to places where fashion is less accessible. To Lisa Mayock, who is one half of the celebrated design duo behind Vena Cava and Viva Vena, all of this represents a “fantastic” step toward the democratization of fashion, in that the abundance of information online forces people to make decisions about what they like and what they don’t. She describes the rise of the nonexpert blogger as “parallel to CNN,” because punditry isn’t necessarily fact based, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle provides an almost infinite amount of space to be filled.
As the fashion world becomes more democratic, the midmarket—the area of the footwear industry devoted to fashionable, affordable, and often disposable shoes—has been able to thrive. A sector once dominated by Nine West and Steve Madden, it’s growing rapidly, thanks to the emergence of the “cool girl” client who can’t afford to wear Manolo Blahniks or Christian Louboutins every day but is fashion fluent and demands high-trend, accessibly priced footwear. Today the midmarket is dominated by the Los Angeles–based company Jeffrey Campbell: a seven-person team that consistently puts out collections featuring more than four hundred distinct styles, that run the gamut from sensible jazz flats to six-inch-high studded platform sandals. Campbell started his career in the stockroom at Nordstrom, then moved up quickly to brand representative: “He’s a trend forecaster—so he always would pick up a brand early,” branding expert Ty McBride, who worked with Campbell for seven years, explains. Eventually Campbell realized that if he “[knew] the trends and knew the [footwear] market—which he did—and he knew production and he knew sales,” then creating his own shoe company could be an “evolutionary” career step.
Campbell started the company out of his garage, and it was a struggle to support his wife and three children while laying the groundwork for the first collection. He waited tables, and the family held tight while they patiently awaited revenue. “With a shoe collection it takes a minimum of six months [to see any income]. You show your first collection, you get orders, you produce it, you deliver it, and they usually want thirty-day to sixty-day terms on payment from a new vendor,” McBride explains. Still, Campbell received enough orders after showing his first collection to keep the business afloat. After that, he steadily—and patiently—built the Jeffrey Campbell name, selling his shoes from more and more locations. “He is obsessed with shoes, almost in a way that it haunts him,” McBride attests. “And I think when you’re midmarket like he is, there’s always that fear that one season you’re gonna have a bad season, and the next season you’ll do OK but if you aren’t back on it [the cool girl client] is not gonna want you. That’s really scary. He doesn’t think that he’s Manolo Blahnik, he doesn’t think that he’s Giuseppe [Zanotti]—those people are going to have shoe careers. They’re legendary. He knows what we sell is disposable, it’s high trend, and it’s quick turnover. I think that there’s this underlying fear if you want to be the top at midmarket, because it’s fast.”
Campbell, with the help of McBride, reached that apex at an unlikely time. In 2008, after stepping up the company’s online presence, McBride recalls that “there were three things that coincided: we launched our site, blogs and blog relations got big, and the economy went to shit. When the economy went bad, Jeffrey and I had a dinner meeting, and he was [worried]. And I was like, well, we have a lot of momentum right now, we’re coming off of two great seasons, I think our competitors are going to produce a lot of black flats and black jazz shoes. And I said: I think we should just bump it up. I think we should give [the client] something to shop for. All my friends that wear 40 percent vintage shoes, 40 percent Jeffrey Campbell–like brands, and 20 percent designer—they weren’t rebuying their basics. They were getting them repaired, and then saving up for a new Marc [Jacobs], or something they didn’t have when they were going to a wedding, gonna see an ex, going out—whatever. So we took the ‘Mel’ sandal—it’s covered in chains, diamond, and pyramid studs, and it’s all straps—and pushed it. It weighed so much, it was inspired from a runway trend, and it blew up. It hit the blogs.”
The decision to lead with outrageous shoes at the height of a recession turned out to be prescient. Following the financial fallout, warrioresque shoes with five-inch-tall needle-thin heels, high-angle wedges, metal studs, straps, and buckles started to fly off the shelves. These kinds of shoes commanded attention, especially at a time when skinny jeans and leggings were so trendy, and allowed for head-to-toe looks to be footwear-centric. Valerie Steele opined that heels have reached new heights in the past few years “because they could! Fashion always goes to the highest extreme—skirts went as high as they could and then they went down again, and the second time around they went higher. It was the same with heels. When they figured out ways to make them higher, and people went for it, and could train themselves to walk in them, then they went as high as possible. If [designers] could come up with some other invention that will make it possible to have them even higher, they will.”
Steele doesn’t buy into the much-bandied economic correlation between the heights of heels and hemlines, nor does she feel the recent bust affected footwear styles. Elizabeth Semmelhack has a different take, prompted by curiosity about the emergence of the vertiginous wedge during the Great Depression. To her, the fact that very high shoes came into fashion first after Black Tuesday, and then again after the Vietnam War and the oil crisis in the 1970s, and then again after the dot-com bust in the 1990s, is too consistent a fashion cycle to dismiss as mere coincidence.
“Maybe it has to do with the fact that people want greater gender dimorphism between men and women [at times of economic stress],” she conjectures. “Maybe it is that the haves want to really make sure that everyone knows they’re the haves. Maybe it is that women are buying less [clothing] and they’re willing to invest something more in a pair of literally uplifting shoes.”
To Ce Ce Chin, shoe designer and founder of the brand 80%20, appealing to women in the new millennium is less about the particulars of each footwear style, and more about seeing into a woman's soul, in the spirit of Ferragamo: “Where does this girl want to be in her life and how is she going to get there? How can our shoes literally help take her there?” Although outrageous, highly editorial shoes—like Alexander McQueen’s otherworldly armadillo platforms—had a powerful recession-era stint in the limelight, we’ve reached the age of great variety, when shoes are as diverse as the women who wear them. Now, for every bestselling extremely studded sandal, there’s a philanthropically inflected TOMS canvas slip-on that’s equally successful. In the first decade of the 2000s, the relationship between women and shoes was cemented, when footwear—in an unprecedented array of colors, styles, and shapes—became synonymous with women’s personal agency. I want shoes, I deserve shoes, and I’m going to buy them for myself—this was a fresh and overwhelmingly prevalent point of view. Just like the ruby slippers before them, today’s shoes are symbolic of the wearer’s hopes and dreams. Be it wealth, fame, career success, or a happy marriage, the nature of the goal itself is less important than identifying the heart’s deepest desire and—without question, fear, or apology—going out to get it.