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Now, a couple of generations on, the shoe has lost its status, at least in the form of the uncomfortable leather shoe – laced-up or high-heeled – a shoe that showed your dedication to both style and regular maintenance, a shoe that proved you were “well-heeled”.
The stylish shoe has been in decline for a while. The male winklepicker, known for its sharp, pointed toe, is long gone. It was the closest the Western world ever got to foot binding. More recently, women appear to have abandoned high heels, at least during working hours, much to the delight of their podiatrists.
Before the formal shoes are thrown into the dustbin of history, could we at least sing them a lullaby of farewell.
The high point of this process was reached this week when the much-married billionaire Rupert Murdoch decided to attend his fifth wedding wearing a stylish dark suit teamed with a pair of sneakers.
OK, he’s old. Ninety-three, in fact, so give the man a break. Maybe his orthotics fit better into this style of shoe? Also, the sneakers were a stylish black to match the suit.
All the same, the moment has come when we can declare the death of the “proper” shoe. Comfort has won over style; toe freedom has defeated “maintaining standards”. The world has eschewed the shoe. We are now, surely, just a generation off the arrival of the wedding UGG boot.
I can only hope it will be available in black.
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A listener, holidaying in Europe, tells me that high heels are now hardly to be seen in the streets of Paris or Rome. In Sydney, I spot a well-dressed businessman on the bus, whose shoes are leather but in the form of slip-ons, with a sort of elastic expander stitched into the side. Lord knows what my mother would think.
It’s all the fault of COVID, I suppose. Once we took off those toe-cramping, ankle-twisting devices, we found it impossible to slip back into them. Also, there was the constant polishing to consider and the difficulty of finding a cobbler – is that what they are still called? – to repair them.
And yet, before the formal shoes are thrown into the dustbin of history, could we at least sing them a lullaby of farewell?
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So farewell to patent leather shoes so highly polished that women were advised to avoid them, lest someone spot their undies in the reflection. And farewell to the tooled Texan boot that gave a chap both 10 centimetres in extra height but also a sharpish pain in the back. And farewell to the Bata Scouts school shoes, so fervently desired, that came with a built-in compass and lion paw prints on the soles.
Show me a sneaker that’s quite as exciting.
Imelda Marcos must be spinning in her grave. Manolo Blahnik must be wondering where it all went wrong. And as for Rupert Murdoch? He may have a wealth of $20 billion, but can I be the first to make the call: he can no longer consider himself “well-heeled”.
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