True Shoe Love SHOES: theyre a great and wonderful thing, the source of much pleasure and pain (on both feet and bank balance), and now the subject of Harrods latest revamp project, as the store opens the doors to its brand new Shoe Heaven department today (read about it in detail in September Vogue - download the issue here). Just what is it about shoes that make them so heavenly a thing to possess? Alexis Mabille couture Picture credit: Indigital Like most women, my fascination began as a child - slipping my too-small feet into my mothers heels, lured by that click-clack sound and a certain sense of glamorous impracticality. But its one that won me over from the start and next I was playing out in a little pair of sparkly spotted heeled pumps that, really, I should have been saving for best for a forthcoming wedding. Such was my penchant for pretty shoes and the great outdoors that we had to re-buy them. Trainers just werent my thing - yet. Teenage years demanded, in my eyes, boring and practical school shoes - yet I always managed to sneak in a platform or something that said fashion as opposed to maths. And outside of school, my collection of shoes was already beginning to amass to more significant proportions than those of my friends. It still does. When one recently visited and proceeded to begin counting the footwear that lined one of several racks and dotted (neatly) the hallway, I had to quickly point out that they should stop right there and then. Until they got inside my flat, they hadnt seen anything yet. I own a lot of shoes. Perhaps its not the biggest revelation: I do work in fashion (although that still doesnt make it OK for friends and family to continue to buy me shoe cards. I am 29, not nine anymore). Yet for all those towering boxes, those points, wedges, platforms, chunky heels, pin-thin stilettos, straps, buckles and blooms, I find myself time and again living a life of shoe rotation and wearing the same few pairs: for comfort and because theyre cool, Converse (Ive had the same pair since I was 16); for fancy occasions, my toe-cleavage-revealing Christian Louboutins; for stomping about in winter or festival fields, some camo boots; and for everything else, my classic Chanel pumps. But note to self, I really should remind myself of what lies beneath all those other lids and layers of tempting tissue paper: my 18th birthday present, a beautiful pair of pink satin Jimmy Choo sandals, an art deco motif at their toe and lengths of leather to wind up the ankle, leaves spawning at their end; gold-studded Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche Perspex platforms, glitter in their heels; vertigo-inducing Manolos in white, blue, black and yellow; Marc Jacobs dancing shoes, Mary-Janes, mouse pumps and more. Harrods new shoe department, therefore, is the stuff of dreams. But before I next add to my collection, it might perhaps be an idea for me to get to grips with my own shoe department, as it were. Now, where did I put those Christopher Kane sandals again?
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 23:27:06 +0000
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