a love affair with shoes

stilettos, wedges, platforms, kitten heels. what is this whole shoe obsession phenomenon with women?


As like all little girls, shoe-obsession started pretty much at the moment I learnt how to crawl. I was trying on my mum's ferragamo's and gucci's and longed for the day I could have my very own pair of high heels. My love for shoes however died down as training for Ballet meant I was wearing ballet shoes all the time anyway.... until a trip to Florence one summer and I walked into Salvatore Ferragamo's shoe museum.

Rows and rows of shoes inside glass boxes... I walked through the rooms in awe, taking in their intricate details, the stories of the women who once wore them.. wondering what I've been missing out on my whole life! Ferragamo designed shoes for numerous female celebrities including Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. He understood how a woman's feet "revealed so much about her past and her personality that he was then able to create her a shoe that was both beautiful and comfortable, close to perfection"*


The shoes he created for Marilyn "intensified her innate sensuality with pointed toes and heels 11cm high, made to the same design for more than 10 years, and which were essential to her seductive sway as she walked."*


While doing research on what shoes meant to women, I stumbled upon an interesting article. The author, a shoe-a-holic herself, stated that “Cinderella’s stepsisters were not desperate for Prince Charming, they were desperate for her glass slipper”. I found this quite amusing.. and an interesting way of depicting women's love affair with shoes.

Actually, one thing that makes me feel like some kind of freak is that I love the smell of fresh new shoes.. whether they are trainers, boots, 5-inch heels. I love the feeling of removing the lid of the box and unwrapping the shoes from the crisp white paper.. there's something about that moment in the shop that you know-even when you're having an absolutely shit day.. you see those shoes lying in the box within the wrapping and suddenly you know everything is better already. But don't get me wrong... I'm not some kind of materialistic fashion victim. In fact, the longer I own a pair of shoes, the more in love I tend to be with them.

Carrie Bradshaw once said on Sex & The City "The fact is, sometimes it's really hard to walk in a single woman's shoes. That's why we need really special ones now and then to make the walk a little more fun."
The thing is, shoes are much more than just shoes in a woman's life. They are our best friends who are there with us to take on all types of adventures life has in store for us, walk us through our day to day journeys and they are the ones who carry us home at the end of all of it.

*quoted from "Salvatore Ferragmo: A love affair with shoes" 2004