I cleaned out my closet a few weeks ago and got rid of 40 pairs of summer shoes I’ve collected over the years, leaving me at least 30 pairs of shoes to start next summer with.
Before you accuse me of running a shoe store from a residential property, let me explain that I buy shoes, not for vanity, but to try to get comfortable, and those shoes I dumped were not comfortable!
Every time I see a new pair of shoes at a store, I think, Maybe these won’t hurt. Of course, the cute factor has to be there, but I’m getting more and more conscious of the comfort factor.
Shoes are deceptive creatures. In the store they fit fine. I put them on and walk around. Comfy. Nothing hurts. Room for toes. Circulation is working. Good choice.
By the time I get them home, something has happened to my “good choice.” In a few short hours, they have turned into the Footwear from an Alien Planet where people walk on metallic pads instead of feet! They’re too short, they squeeze my toes, they rub my heel. I don’t return them because surely I can break them in. . .?
“Why did you buy them if they hurt your feet?” my husband asks. Male logic would make me scream if I weren’t already screaming from pain in my metatarsals.
Some shoes are designed by men who obviously hate women. Maybe their mothers beat them and their sisters pinched them when they were little. Anyway, these designers must make shoes to cut off our circulation so that we can’t walk fast enough to keep up with men in their flat, sensible shoes.
Then we have to stay that respectable ten paces behind the man, favored by ancient Chinese emperors, who also told girls’ mothers that if they bound the feet of their young daughters so that the feet stayed unusable nubs the size of new potatoes, the girls would be extra desirable and the emperor would marry them even faster, which is what every mother wanted for her daughter.
I guess sitting around (literally, since they couldn’t walk) in a Chinese harem was a pretty cool thing in those days, because mothers jammed their daughters’ feet into size 4 Life Strides and left them there. Which is okay if your hubby is an emperor who can afford to pay a couple of beefy guys to carry you around in one of those little sedan chairs, but even if I pay them minimum wage, I can’t afford that luxury. I have to be able to walk.
Other shoes are designed by men who love women, but only as art objects. These designers jam a 4-inch spike onto an otherwise wearable pump. Certainly, nothing gives a woman that “come hither” look like a short skirt and a 4-inch heel, but by the time she “comes hither,” she’ll be rolling on the floor with leg cramps. Not a pretty sight.
Being a devotee of fashion, I’ve tried all kinds of shoes over the years. Most of them have had injurious results.
My mother was a great admirer of Shirley Temple. So as a kid, I was clamped into a pair of steel-toed Mary Janes just like the child actress wore in her films. Needless to say, they didn’t conform to the foot. The foot did what Mary Jane said. I could barely make it through Sunday school and church in them once a week.
I wore the high heels with needle-sharp toes in the ‘60s. If you will examine your toes carefully, you will see that, spread out in the state which God intended, toes are shaped more like a fan than a needle.
I, like every other college girl at the time, wore Bass Weejans. The shoe salesman told you to “break them in,” but Weejans broke you before you broke them.
Platforms, which girls today think are “new,” are another killer design. They came out in the 70’s, and everybody knows how many intelligent things were designed in the 70’s — 8-track tapes that wadded up in the player: KISS, the rock group that dressed funny and poked out their tongues; men’s ties the size of bibs.
Platform shoes elevated your feet 3 inches off the ground. We thought we looked cute in them, but, not able to feel the ground through her shoes, every girl who wore them miscalculated the distance to the step at least once and wound up sprawled over a curb. And platforms make you walk funny — like clomping through a field trying to avoid cow chips.
So on through the wedges and flats and slides and flip-flops, we limped through the end of the 20th century, ruining our backs and developing bunions for the sake of being fashionable.
I’ll keep looking for shoes that don’t hurt but have a high cuteness factor, but I’m not having much luck. Flats look dumpy. Tennis shoes look like motorboats on your feet. Boots worn with dresses shorten the appearance of your leg and make you look heavier.
Maybe the answer for the modern comfort-seeking girl is bare feet! But you might get cold, and then there’s that cow chip thing to worry about . . . .
