Keke Palmer on her shoe line, calling out Wendy Williams and her love of Carrie Bradshaw

Impact

Keke Palmer is no lazy multi-hyphenate. 

The 23-year-old actress-singer-songwriter-designer-author-philanthropist is keeping herself busy with her latest shoe collection, her second collaboration with online subscription service ShoeDazzle.

The Scream Queens starlet and recent author of the book I Don't Belong to You: Quiet the Noise and Find Your Voice, is taking her second foray into shoe design (the first came out in October 2016) seriously.

When it comes to the design — and even Palmer's fearless style choices — the goal is simple. "I'm trying to make people gag," she said in an interview. "I want people to look and think, 'That girl is having fun.'"

ShoeDazzle
ShoeDazzle

And fun for Palmer does not equate to expensive. In fact, the shoes start at only $39.95. 

"Because that's everything I'm about," she explained. "You can be just like me, but you don't have to break your pockets to the nth degree. That's what the girls are thinking about. You want to be able to get that fly look — and you want to be able to get more than one."

Can we ever expect a full-on Keke Palmer-designed clothing line? The answer, it turns out, is it's more a question of when. "It's something that will come at a certain point."

ShoeDazzle
ShoeDazzle

Asked about her biggest style icon, Palmer gave what seemed like a prototypical response: Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. But her reasoning had less to do with Carrie's famed Manolo Blahnik's. "I love that her style had a little bit of tacky to it. I think tackiness is something that people don't really appreciate enough when it comes to fashion. 

She continued:

Look back at some of those episodes with Carrie, she looked a hot ass mess... but really good though at the same time because she was expressing herself. That's what great wardrobe stylists do — same thing with Scream Queens — they create a character through styling. Now whether you like their style at all or not, you're able to really see the character come through because of the consistency of their fashion; because they undoubtedly know who they are. And that's what I liked about Carrie: the consistency in her fashion because she knew who she was.

Though the topic of this interview was shoes, I would have been remiss not to ask her about a recent news story Palmer found herself at the center of. 

In January, Palmer accused rapper Trey Songz of featuring her in a music video without her consent after using "sexual intimidation" to secretly film her for his music video. She addressed the controversy during a recent appearance on The Wendy Williams Show, and used the opportunity to take Williams to task for her lack of compassion toward the situation.

This call-out was not spur of the moment. "I already knew everything [Wendy] had been saying about me. But I wasn't mad at her. It was more so for me about 'how can I really expose the situation for the problem that it is?'"

The problem, according to Palmer, is three-fold. 

"A: Women are told to accept sexual harassment or just disrespect on any scale. Then B: Other women are going to shame them if they don't. And then C: Especially within the African-American community, black women are almost supposed to pride themselves on how much shit they can take. And I felt that with her having a talk show and a platform, it would be such a cool moment to have opened up with me about the kind of things we both have endured being women trying to work and trying to be leaders in our career fields. That's always the angle that I try to go from: I try to figure out a way to expose the issue within a situation instead of taking it personally."

Palmer joins other notable celebrities — including just this week's stories from Lisa Kudrow and Jane Fonda — to speak out about experiences of sexism, sexual abuse and sexual assault within the industry.

To learn more about (and shop the looks from) Palmer's ShoeDazzle collaboration click here.