New Shoon...

...or Auld Feet?

My sister is younger and slimmer than me but possessed of the same shoe fetish. Last week she was meeting a friend for lunch in the centre of Glasgow. Like any sensible person she decided to leave the car at home and take the train. The shoes she chose to wear were not new, fairly low-heeled, very attractive and well broken-in. By the time she'd walked from her house to the train station, the skin was off her heels. Yes, her shoes had turned on her.

This is a phenomenon I found out for myself years ago. I had to go to a conference in Glasgow. During the walk from Central Station to the Concert Hall (not that far), my lovely - and quite expensive - brown suede and leather, mid-heeled pumps turned on me. My heels were ripped to shreds. By the time I took my seat for the conference, I was already wondering how on earth I was going to get home at the end of the day. I was lucky: a colleague with a Mary Poppins handbag (she knows who she is) lent me a pair of mules she just happened to be carrying about and I made it back to Central without having to stop for a greet on the way. I'd had these shoes for a couple of years and had worn them regularly.

In both these cases, what on earth had gone wrong?

Here's my theory. You can't buy shoes in half sizes any more unless they are from the top of the price range and not everybody can afford that. My sister sometimes has to buy shoes that are really half a size too big for her. I don't. These days I just don't buy shoes as often and usually buy pricey ones so I can get a half size. So why can't we get half sizes? Well, it's not for our benefit that half sizes have been done away with. We often end up having to buy insoles to try to make the shoes fit. So is it for the benefit of manufacturers then? When they're commissioning cheap shoes from sweat shops in India etc, they can limit the different kinds of shoes they order. Maybe it's for retailers? With no half sizes, shops like Asda and co can reduce the amount of space they give shoes on their display racks.

Now this is fine for manufacturers and retailers, but can we rewind to the 1960s and have a look at what happened to women's feet then? A whole generation were so busy stuffing their feet into cheap stiletto heels and platforms they ignored the warnings of foot doctors (there must be a posh Latin word for them!) and chiropodists and ended up crippled. I have friends who in their 60s are paying for the fashionable but bad, bad, bad shoes they wore then.

So what's the difference between the shoes below?

These are from the 1960s. My sister wore shoes like the ones on the left. For a very short time, I had shoes like those in the middle. 

These shoes are from now, worn by a guest at my great-nephew's christening a few weeks back. Other than that, there's no difference. Most women can't walk in any of them. 

You can see women being oxtered along the road by their pals most Saturday nights in these shoes. These are the who get handed flip-flops by the police when they are too drunk to walk on their high heels. The lassie's shoes are definitely too small for her. 

Anybody else remember Josie from the Karen Dunbar Show? 

If the 1960s shoes stored up a world of trouble for us then, isn't it likely the shoes of today will do the same for today's women?

And I'm not even going into the issue of sexual stereotyping that puts pressure on women to wear shoes like this or why I think fashion 'designers' are having a laugh at our expense.