Her friend and fellow dancer Raquel Coltrinari joined her in business shortly thereafter. "At that time the business was in my house," Ms. Muñiz says. "We had a separate workshop where we were making the shoes — it's always been that way — but we were selling them out of my living room. The trouble was that very soon, there were twenty women in my living room almost every hour of the day. And eventually some rather famous ones in tango began coming ... Graciela Gonzalez, especially. But Alejandra Mantinan as well. Geraldine Rojas, who was in Robert Duvall's film Assassination Tango ..." Ms. Muñiz mentions several other names: Nora Dinzelbacher, Mariela Franganillo  — a gallery of tango dancers with world-wide reputations.

"Even Robert Duvall came to our shop," she says. Duvall, a noted aficionado of tango, had heard of them and wanted to see what was happening. "A lot of men have asked me when we'll start making shoes for them. We'd like to do that, but now..."

Ms. Muñiz looks around the shop. One woman, a bank manager from London, has eleven pairs of shoes at her feet and is debating with her husband how many she should buy. Pink silk. Lacquer-like blacks and greys. Fire-like golds. Wine reds. Three inch heels. Four inch heels. Green satins. Blue silk ribbons. He says she should buy them all.

"Just now we don't have time," Ms. Muñiz says.

The woman agrees with her husband — very happily — and nods to Ms. Coltrinari to wrap them all up.

"But also," Ms. Muñiz continues, "women's shoes are more fun. There's no limit to the elegance in a woman's shoe."

An essential element in the beauty of these shoes is the fabrics from which they are made. Ms. Muñiz and Ms. Coltrinari make periodic trips to the fairs in Milan, Bologna, Paris, and other centers, where they can find the most daring and highest quality fabrics and leathers for their designs. One wonders how they have time to do all that and run the shop on a day-to-day basis. "Yes, well, it wasn't born a business," Ms. Coltrinari says. "But when we decided to make it into a business, the business began immediately to pursue us!"

Beatrice Bowles, a San Francisco writer who has been dancing tango for four years with an intensity that humbles most Buenos Aires women who know her, says that "sure, I can spend six hundred dollars on a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes, but what's that going to get me? They're beautiful. Among the most beautiful. But I couldn't dance a step in them. I can walk in them and all of my friends will tell me how wonderful I look. But if I have to dance, I want Comme il Faut."