Alejandro ingelmo born

NEW YORK — With luxury retailers, fancy hotels, skyscraper offices and chic outdoor cafes along its borders, you might expect to see a parade of the most spectacular footwear at Rockefeller Center.

But shoe designer Alejandro Ingelmo knows better.

Ingelmo's family then moved to Coral Gables, Florida, where Alejandro was born and raised by hard-working parents who continued to work in shoe.

The lone shoe designer nominated for this year's CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award, Cuban-born, Miami-bred Alejandro Ingelmo, is swiftly racking.

But his cobbling roots were embedded long before the Cuban-American was born.

After Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, Ingelmo's family relocated to Miami, where Alejandro was born and raised.

Cuban-American shoe designer Alejandro Ingelmo travels for the first Born and raised in southern Florida and a proud Cuban-American, Ingelmo.

Too many people don’t know how to find comfort, fashion and function in one pair of shoes, and style is often the first to be sacrificed, he says.

It’s supposed to be the season of more wedges and fewer flip-flops, according to the “experts,” but Ingelmo recently spent a morning in Midtown with The Associated Press on a reality-check mission to see what everyday folk are wearing.

And what he found was too many toning shoes and not enough slingbacks.

“I do notice shoes all the time. Sometimes there’s so much bad stuff, it’s just too much information,” Ingelmo says. “Sometimes I can’t look.”

But Ingelmo, maker of elegant, sophist