Closet of the Day: Mariah Carey's Palatial Shoe Paradise

By Kerry Folan Jan 30, 2013, 12:00pm EST

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Here at Racked, we're dedicating this week to the kind of fantastical shopping that most of us only get to experience in dreams (or at 80%-off sample sales). Taking a page from casino parlance, we'll be talking a lot about "whales," those big spenders who feel perfectly comfortable dropping tens of thousands of dollars every night on roulette, or, in our case, on Cartier. Welcome to Whale Week 2013.

Photo via InStyle

Mariah Carey's palatial New York apartment is also home to her mind-boggling wardrobe and world-famous shoe closet. The Mario Buatta–designed dressing room looks more like a boutique than a closet, with an "open viewing arrangement" and clothes displayed by color and type. An adjoining "shoe room" contains a good portion of the 1,000 pairs of shoes she claims to own. (The rest are in storage, fyi.)

The star saved room for some personal details in her gilded boudoir, with gold-leaf designs and the initial "M" worked into the the bleachwood floor. Says Carey, "It's not really a traditional closet, but I worked hard for this mess." Take a gander after the jump.