How’s this for a big, fat, screaming paradox? I like shoes, in the same way that Hef likes blondes. The same way Amy Winehouse likes to ‘flirt’ with Class A’s. The same way that WAGS like fake tan and getting ‘papped’ on their holliers. That is to say, I like shoes A LOT.
Yet here’s the rub. Girls who harp on incessantly, breathlessly and publicly about how much they love their shoes? Me no likey.
To me, it’s become such a pathetic, predictable, lazy single-girl cliché. Ostensibly taking their lead from Sex & The City and its ilk, a lot of successful women bang on about Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks as though they are the singular passports to success, sexiness and being beautiful. However, these tend to be the same ladies who tote a fake Mulberry or Louis Vuitton bag across town, and carry their gym gear in a battered Harvey Nichols bag. Pay no mind to them. Give me a girl who’s got a weakness for knickers, notebooks…hell, even nipple-clamps, any day of the week. Anything but a lass who’s happy to follow the crowd. Lord knows I tried to break away from my own innate, inbred love of shoes but it seems I am alas stuck with this particular passion.
Long before Carrie Bradshaw or Marian Keyes ever said I could, I coveted footwear like no other. In Junior infants, Emma Thompson became the first of a long line of people I would envy from the ankle down. The girl showed up in school – without warning, I hasten to add – wearing patent grey Mary-Janes. Next to my sensible black sandals, she might as well have been wearing Cinderella’s crystal slippers. I was beside myself with envy and avarice.
The following summer, I begged the powers that be for grey Mary-Janes. I petitioned and canvassed like a politician in the last-chance saloon, marched and howled like a pint-sized suffragette, until the yearly pilgrimage to Clarks. Come September, and resplendent in my own Mary-Janes, I went back to school to find that Emma Thompson was now wearing red, pointy sandals. They even had a little heel. Bitch.
Up until the age of seven, I became roundly and unhealthily obsessed with Holy Communion shoes, pawing them and perving on them every chance I got. Shag the dress, veil and parasol. Or the money, for that matter. I recall the day my mother produced her own Holy Communion photograph. It was the ’50s, and the poor girl looked stony-faced and stoic in a cast-off from one of her 6 sisters and sensible black shoes. At the time I was appalled - she might as well have walked down the aisle on bloody stumps.
Next up came a year-long fling with acid-bright canvas pumps, thanks in part to Dirty Dancing. (As an aside, a pal – with three sisters, no less – admitted that she had never seen this nugget of cinematic frivolity. It was like hearing she had no nipples. But I digress). My pocket money went not on toys (I would bag whatever gadgets my brothers had), but on magazines like Look In! Hi!, Girl, and Smash Hits, and pumps in every garish colour of the rainbow. And let me tell you, there’s nothing like the sight of an immaculately-heeled 10-year-old playing rough with boys’ toys.
In secondary school came the mandatory Converse/penny loafer/brothelcreeper phase. It was my first and last attempt at normalcy, and I broke free towards the world of gnarly steel-toe boots as soon as I could. My mother and grandmother would stare down at my monstrosities – teamed with cheesecloth shorts, check shirts, or whatever Courtney Love was wearing that week – with a mixture of awe, revulsion, confusion and amusement. It was like I had strapped two miniature bearded ladies to my shins.
Anyway, you get the gist. There is no extricating myself from this now abominable and unimaginative folly at this stage in the game. Nowadays, people come to my house and visit ‘the shoes’, as though I’m harbouring a pair of conjoined albino twins in a cage in my spare room. And yes, the shoes are a sight to behold…plentiful, colourful, many of them treacherously vertiginous. Still, I don’t go in for the designer stuff: you can keep your Manolos (too ladylike), your Jimmy Choos (too pricey) and your Ginas (too slaggy). As long as I can get my hands on Buffalo beauts and old faithfuls from Penneys, I’m a happy camper.
Sometimes I think about Emma Thompson, hoping that she’s had six kids and works part-time in telemarketing, destined never again to even smell a new shoe in these recession-riddled times. For my part, I shall continue to do the hoovering in my newest pair of heels, to break them in before they make their open-air debut. If it’s any consolation, this career as a footwear fiend has rendered my tootsies callused, corned, blistered and banjaxed to bits. Au naturel, they look like the doormats of hell. If anything, I need the shoes for camouflage.
Hehe, I have bought shoes that have never seen the pavement. Shoes that I’ve worn solely indoors because they were either completely impractical or the wrong size. I had red patent lace-up shoes when I was a kid in school. Slagged to fuck for them. Everyone else was wearing trainers. :/
Hah, I was slightly obsessed with my own communion shoes too! So white! So shiny! I was actually more of a, um, communion-zilla than a bride-zilla - the hunt for my wedding dress was virtually stress-free, but when I was on the communion frock quest I practically had tantrums in several shops when dresses didn’t meet my bewilderingly high standard. I eventually found my dream frock in Switzers - it featured a bolero. Dear oh dear. Well, it was 1983.
Although I love shoes, I always end up wearing flats because I just can’t bear the discomfort of heels (apart from wedges). I can accept a certain amount of discomfort when it comes to style, but not when it means agony with every step.
I have many lovely pairs that also never leave the house because I can’t abide walking the streets in heels. I cannot wait to buy new boots for the autumn. A pair in black and one in brown.
Fab.
I’m not really a shoe girl, comfort comes before everything with me, so I have lots of flat pumps, runners and boots. As far fancier stuff, I have some not too high vintage type t-bars and some 50s stilettos that hurt before I even leave the house.
I can’t remember the exact details, but my mother ended up buying me communion shoes that were black and we had to dye them. Of course the dyes then weren’t as fancy-schmancy as they are now, and in hindsight the shoes looked like I’d just covered them in Tippex.
Honoria - guilty as charged. Some of my shoes have also never felt fresh air on them either - but have seen their fair share of hoovering. God love them. They’re normally the ones that I bought in a size or two smaller, believing I could stretch them out. Sort of in the same way that you buy a pair of jeans a size smaller cos you’ll go on a diet, someday…
Penny - I can’t even remember my Communion dress. The Confirmation dress, on the other hand, was an atrocity; a floral yoke with a pilgrim collar, teamed with a white jacket and a weird Vanilla Ice crop. I shit thee not. Still, the faux-satin pink pumps redeemed me. Believe it or not, the discomfort from a really high pair of shoes often borders on exquisite with the right amount of booze imbibed. Fact.
I’m also awaiting Autumn’s boots with whitened knuckle and bated breath Medbh - in addition to black and brown, grey boots are a sound, sound investment. But don’t you feel like a fox walking down the street in heels? Either there’s something wrong with you, or I’m a wanton tart.
Ruby - just as well you’re not a shoe person; that Communion episode would leave me with mental scars needing decades of serious therapy. Tippexed Communion shoes? Jesus Christ, my SYMPATHIES….
No, Leigh, I completely get the appeal of strutting down the street in heels, but it kills my back and feet. I will also keep an eye out for grey boots.
I am with you, Medbh. Even the joy of strutting does not compensate for the pain. When I was in college I would leave a pair of Converse in my friends’ college rooms during the Trinity Ball so I could start the evening in fancy shoes and then move into runners when my feet started hurting (usually about half an hour, max, after I arrived). Although I must confess that the last time I went to the Ball, in 1998 (the year after I graduated - God, I’m old) I wore a pair of square-toed boots belonging to my sister that went so well with my little ’60s frock that, despite the foot pain, I couldn’t bear to replace them and so hobbled about in them all night. On cobbles. Never again!
Ruby, although the thought of those Tippex-looking shoes filled me with horror, their sad story also made me laugh out loud.
And Leigh, I think we all need to do full posts about our confirmation outfits! I will save the full horror of my own ensemble for that, but will just reveal that part of this delightful outfit was a pair of white lace-ups laced with ribbons that matched my dress.
also, what is with a certain type of gay man screaming at you, ‘oh MYGODI loooove your shoes’, as some form of thing they feel they *have to do*?
Yeah yeah guys, we get it, you’ve seen SATC a time or two. There is more to me than footwear - though I bloody love it.
Kirstie, maybe the gay-man-shoe-fetish is all about shoes being phallic symbols?
And whoever came up with the expression ‘fuck-me shoes’ is a genius.
It’s probably a mass generalisation to say that certain gay men love shoes because they have immaculate taste. Ah fuck it. I’ll generalise away.
I must say Kirstie, I get no end of validation when gay men fall at my feet…doesn’t happen nearly enough for my liking.
Any Penny…Converse runners at the Trinity Ball? That sorta rocks. I applaud you.
Erica Jong? Oh - nope, that was the zipless fuck. River Island do a nice line in fuck me whore stylee shoes and they have a sale on at the moment - I scored me a pair of FMWSS for a mere 40 eurobucks. Oh joy!