By Vicky Allan
WHAT'S WRONG with shoes?" Imelda Marcos once said. "I collected them because it was like a symbol of thanksgiving and love." Back in the days when most women had no more than a half-dozen pairs, the world was shocked when the Marcos palace was raided and 3000 shoes were found. What's interesting about this is that Imelda also had 500 gowns, 300 bras, gallons of perfume, yet it was the shoes for which she was pilloried.
Shoes have long and potent iconography. There is a reason so many fairy stories revolve around them. Historically, and in developing countries today, the shoe, and the lack of it, was what separated the rich from the poor and the poor from the very poor. Now here we are in the 21st century, being told for the second time in 2006 that the women of Britain are shoe addicts, that one in 10 of us have a £3000 collection and 2.6 million of us have 30 shoes each. To show that you are a proper woman these days, you have to coo over Choos and moan-ohlo over Blahniks.
Some of these stories of female indulgence contain a streak of misogyny. But the current shoe hysteria deserves a potshot. These days there is an inverse relationship between quantity of shoes owned and practicality. The more shoes a woman has the less wearable they tend to be, giving her every excuse to keep them in constant circulation, shift-working several sets a night to ensure against cripple effect and collateral blood damage.
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This is not a fashionable view. Grumbling about the hobbling of women by the heel, is, these days, considered such a pass feminist activity as to have been relegated to the bra incinerator of history. But my objection has less to do with politics than comfort: a dislike of things that pinch, cauterise and blister, and a desire to dance and run sometimes. Am I the only woman who finds even the mildest strappy heel a device equivalent to the Inquisition's Spanish Boot?
There are, of course, shoes that I have loved. I once spent £90 on a pair with two inch rubber heels after going back three times to ensure that they really were what I thought they were: heels you could comfortably run in if in pursuit of a disappearing bus. Nevertheless, my relationship with shoes has been restrained.
This is not meant to be the equivalent of Hans Andersen's The Red Shoes: a morality tale about the perils of vanity, in which a girl's shoe obsession has her trapped in a pair that don't stop dancing, her only remedy to have her feet chopped off. It's just that as soon as a consumer trend reaches this kind of hysteria, it surely has to be questioned. There are certain things in our culture which we are encouraged to collect and covet. An expensive shoe stash is one of them. They represent a form of conspicuous bingeing. If you are a sexy, empowered woman of today, it suggests, you indulge yourself, spending your own hard-earned money on this expression of independence. But, given that there is, surely, some relationship between carbon footprint and number of footprints on your shoe-rack, isn't this just one way of demonstrating how flagrantly acquisitive you are? Couldn't the truth be that you already have one foot in Imelda's shoes?
