Argentina has seldom looked kindly upon business innovation — and especially manufacturing innovation — because of a pervasive opinion in the country that things not made in Europe are of second- or even third-rate quality and value. Huge land grants to those who'd brought off the Spanish conquest, and the centuries-long reliance on those lands — and the Indians who lived on them — as the principal source of income for the upper classes, made manufacturing unnecessary.

From the moment the first conquistadores landed on Argentine soil, European products began flowing into the territory. The kind of technical and business innovation that became second nature to the North Americans never really occurred to the Argentines. Spanish, French, and English products seemed just too fine to be replaced by anything the locals could do, and those products flowed into Argentina to fill the mansions and estancias of the oligarchs. Reliance on foreign commercial partnerships and foreign capital continued into current times, when little that is manufactured in Argentina can be found in any of the stores.

Alicia Muñiz and Raquel Coltrinari are the owners of Comme il Faut, a three-year-old Buenos Aires company specializing in the design and manufacture of extremely elegant women's shoes, and they are defying that historical tide. They make shoes for tango, and their shoes have quickly become the shoes for serious tango dancers. Women of fashion who don't dance but who do want comfortable shoes of world-class design to accompany their evening wear, who would more regularly wear Jimmy Choo or Manolo Blahnik, are coming to Comme il Faut as well.

All this at a price of about ninety dollars a pair.

Elaine Sirois-Lucha, a San Francisco executive assistant who is an accomplished dancer of Argentine tango, took less than an hour one day recently to buy fourteen pairs of shoes from Comme il Faut's little shop located in the exclusive Barrio Norte district of Buenos Aires.

"If I could have taken more, I would have," she says. "But I bought everything they showed me, and that particular day they didn't have any more of my size in stock."

Altogether Ms. Sirois-Lucha owns twenty-four pairs of Comme il Faut shoes.

To get to Comme il Faut, you stroll up the very tony tree-lined Calle Arenales and turn into a narrow passageway, bright with sunlight reflected from its high white walls. Most of the shops on either side of the passage are reached by narrow internal stairways, although there is a very fashionable art gallery on the ground level. Comme il Faut is at the far end of the passage on the left, on the second floor.

If you've heard of this company, chances are that the description has bordered on the ecstatic, so popular are these shoes among the tango crowd. But when you arrive at the showroom, its stark simplicity comes as a great surprise. You stand in a gloomy stairwell and knock at the door. A small square peephole opens at eye level, and you identify yourself as an interested shopper. You wonder if this is a speakeasy. The door opens and you enter a high-ceilinged white room with several comfortable chairs, a desk, a zebra skin rug on the floor, mirrors on two walls, Ms. Muñiz and Ms. Coltrinari and a bevy of enchanted customers trying on shoes, comparing purchases, offering advice to each other. The shoes are scattered everywhere across the floor, objects of conversation for everyone in the store. And they are from everywhere. "The shop is a Tower of Babel of languages," Ms. Coltrinari says. "All by word of mouth from all over the world." As you speak with the owners about their company, they are making sales right and left. I interviewed them for about an hour, and more than two dozen pairs of shoes were sold during the conversation.