Shoes: Girl's best friend
Glittrz171
Easy to find and always pleasing, shoes are reeeally a girl's best friend
By KATHY FLANIGAN
kfla...@journalsentinel.com
Last Updated: Oct. 25, 2003
That's not the pitter patter of little feet you hear. It's the flutter of
Tracey Carson's heart as she contemplates the many pairs of shoes in her
closet.
Hers is a collection from "really dressy sexy shoes to spectators to pumps to
boots," said a sheepish Carson, vice president of integrated marketing for
Boelter + Lincoln in Milwaukee. Among her sole mates is one pair of Manolo
Blahniks and two pairs of athletic shoes. Probably 50 pairs in the inventory
are black.
The prevailing question is why. Why do women, Carson included, love shoes so
much?
"They can complete an outfit for one thing," Carson said. "They can make one
outfit look like a completely different outfit just by virtue of the accessory.
"There are some shoes that just speak. They're like works of art. How can you
not? You have to have them," said Carson, whose largest shoe purchase in a day
came during a trip to Italy. She won't say how many she came home with.
Imelda Marcos reportedly had 1,200 or more pairs of shoes. There are at least
that many reasons women love shoes. We gathered a few.
High pleasure, low angst
"There seems to be a little bit of Imelda Marcos in many many women," said
Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology
in Manhattan.
"The average American woman has, maybe, a dozen pairs of shoes, which is maybe
nine more than the average American man."
Steele clicked off reasons for this imbalance of footwear power.
"One has to do with it being a pleasurable kind of shopping. Look at the
continuum from women trying on swimsuits being the most painful," she said.
Trying on shoes - bunions excepted - would be the more pleasurable extreme.
"It's not a question of your size, not angsting about 'Oh, I've gotten fat.'
You can almost always find a pair of shoes that fit."
"You don't get too old for a beautiful pair of shoes, either. I remember seeing
Marlene Dietrich shopping for shoes at Bloomingdale's when she was in her 70s."
Steele takes a breath. A short one.
"Secondarily, you can get more fashion bang for your buck with shoes than with
garments. Designer shoes are expensive. You may be talking $400 for a pair of
Dolce & Gabbana shoes, but for a Dolce & Gabbana outfit, you'd pay thousands of
dollars."
For her part, Steele said she has 50 pairs of shoes, a number she describes as
"trifling."
"Personally, if I love a pair of shoes I wear them a lot. I wear them out
faster than I ought to," she said.
Yes, we only have two feet. But there are so many choices: Flip flops, sling
backs, boots, stilettos, pumps, Mary Janes, all smelling of fresh leather. For
many women, it is a soul-to-sole romance.
"I think it's rather like that thing they say about lipstick," said Gay Bryant,
executive editor of Shuz magazine, a magazine devoted to shoe buying. "If you
buy a lipstick, it can transform you."
"They (shoes) can make you tall where you weren't tall before. They can make
you sexy where you weren't sexy before," Bryant said. "Putting on a great pair
of shoes signals that you care, that you feel attractive, feel good about
yourself. The other thing is that shoes are beautiful. A sort of craftsmanship
goes into them. I cannot get passionate about a pair of Nikes the way I can
about a pair of Manolos (Blahniks)."
It begins in childhood
Candy Pratts Price, executive fashion director for Style.com and a woman who
has had face time with her shoe's creators, calls women's shoe obsession
long-standing.
"Take it to the point of when you were a little girl. Did you not go to your
Mom's closet and try on her shoes?" asked Pratts Price.
Advertising executive Carson, who can talk about a pair of Andrew Geller red
dress shoes like she's talking about a Picasso, says her shoe obsession comes
straight from her DNA. Her mother is a shoe lover. For Carson, sometimes the
outfit dictates a new shoe. Sometimes a new shoe dictates a new outfit.
Venture into a shoe sale in the women's department and you'd need the skill of
a big-game hunter aiming at her prey and then stalking a sales clerk to enlist
his or her help before, finally, leaving with a few trophy shoes tucked under
the arm. In her wake there might be 10 boxes of shoes that, for any reason,
didn't make the cut. That's the essence of woman-on-shoe love.
Which is why designers like Blahnik, Jimmy Choo or Donald J. Pliner court women
with gusto. It doesn't hurt to have a little flash in the business, said Randy
L. Brown, incoming chairman of the National Shoe Retailers Association.
Of course, Brown only speaks of flash for one half of the population - not his
own.
"Men's legs don't show and when they do, they don't care generally."
Through a man's eye
Michael Duranko used to be that kind of guy. His favorite pair of shoes were
black on white golf shoes with metal cleats. Duranko, 38, didn't imagine
himself writing a book about women's shoes.
Yet, here's his name on the cover of a new book dedicated to shoe love,
"Bootism: A Shoe Religion." (Andrews McMeel Publishing, $10.95).
"I was shocked at how passionate people were about shoes," said Duranko, who
shares author credit with Penina Goodman.
In fact, the truly shoe learned can make the Bootist Hall of Fame, which is on
Duranko's Web site at www.bootism.com. Since the Web site started in August,
"Sex and the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker, a well-shod and well-known shoe
addict, has topped the list, which also sometimes includes Katie Couric and a
rare male - Carson Kressley from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
Duranko talked to lots of women with shoe obsessions. One was his wife, Tina.
When the couple took a year to backpack Third-World countries, Tina was upset
that she could only take five pairs of shoes - none of them stilettos.
He spoke with another woman who did everything she could to hide her shoe
habit, including scuffing shoes so her husband wouldn't guess they were new.
"One thing I heard over and over again are that shoes are so distinctly
different than trying on a bathing suit or buying anything else. It doesn't
matter if you're 5 pounds overweight," Duranko said. "Even if your shoe size
goes up three sizes, you can still wear certain things that, gosh, if you went
up three dress sizes you'd really have to change."
Women actually eat before they try on shoes, said Dayna Grubb, owner of Ped
(www.pedshoes.com), a shoe store in Seattle. She maintains that noon to 2 p.m.
is the busiest shoe shopping time. No one says that about jeans.
Grubb, 35, doesn't oversubscribe to shoe adoration. She has only a dozen pairs
at home - none of them black.
"I don't have an obsession because everything in the store is mine. I take the
shoes that aren't selling as well. That way, I start to sell the crazy color,"
Grubb said.
Pain, men and lust
Think about "Cinderella." In the classic fairy tale, Cindy finds true love
because unlike the others who attended the Prince's ball, her delicate toes fit
into an uncomfortable glass slipper. Ask a woman what she remembers about "The
Wizard of Oz" and odds are that she'll answer: "ruby slippers."
The tale underscores another truism for women and shoes: pain. Fashion
historian and author Steele recently spoke with National Public Radio as part
of a report about the lengths women will go to for shoes - including having
their feet surgically sculpted and plumped or toes shortened to better wear the
pointed-toe pumps of today.
"Well into (the) 20th century shoes were a sign of prestige," Steele said. It's
only gotten worse as names like Monolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, SigersonMorrison
begin to roll off the tongue.
"Now through things like InStyle, any number of 12-year-olds will be able to
tell you who are the key shoemakers," Steele said.
There is a certain irony that most well-known designer names are male
designers. It's probably not that way in the factory, experts like Steele say.
Manolo Blahnik works with his sister. Two women are behind the scenes at Jimmy
Choo. SigersonMorrison are women - Kari Sigerson and Miranda Morrison.
As with any relationship, there is lust. Picture a woman in thigh-high boots.
Women always have been in tune with the power of the stiletto, the pointy-toed
shoe or the sexy boot.
"I think women are quite aware of that," Steele said.
In fact, she remembers shopping one day when she slipped out of a pair of
loafers and into a pair of pumps.
The man next to her turned her way and said, "Now you're sexy."
"I know what he meant in a way, sure. My leg looked different," Steele said.
Then she riffed on a performance in which artist / actress Anne Magnuson spoke
about how high stiletto heels made her feel "taller and thinner and curvier all
at once."
Even in tough economic times, the experts claim shoe shopping has become sport
- for both sexes.
"Men have gotten really knowledgeable about women's shoes. Shoe shopping is a
really hot spectator sport for men. And men don't seem to mind how much women
spend on shoes," said Shuz editor Bryant.
Author Duranko has done a complete about face on shoe collecting and shopping.
He likes it.
"I actually have become an observer of the shoe-obsessed," said Duranko,
adding: "I'm really not a bootist. My real training was being married for seven
years to a woman that was crazy about shoes."
He dedicated the book to her.