Real women wear flat shoes
The magazines are full of precarious 6in heels, but in the real world, Clarks is doing a roaring trade in mid-height shoes. What is behind this collective act of fashion disobedience?
As I walked down Oxford Street a couple of weeks ago, my eyes slid to the left and I noticed a window full of sensible shoes, and they were quite nice in a modest sort of way. But in despair I saw the sign above the entrance: Clarks, the home of regulation school sandals, the shop where I was taken by my mother to have my feet measured and x-rayed with an exciting machine that could see through to the bones.
Fashion disobedience … Alexa Chung wears Russell & Bromley loafers. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Yet peering further, I noticed that the shop was crammed with fashionable young people trying on footwear with low heels and rounded toes. Venturing inside, this startling vision was confirmed. All around were rows and rows of shoes that looked comfortable. My feet sighed with pleasure at the sight of them. They had nice straps to hold them on and the soles were airy cushions of padded leather. There was not a single pair of what the magazines call "fierce heels", shoes inspired by Chinese footbinding, designed to cruelly entrap the toes in sharp points and elevate the heels to such heights that walking becomes a hobble. There were no bondage shoes at all. Nor were there many ballet flats, those flimsy little numbers with papery soles, sending shock waves up your spine every time your foot hits the pavement, making your calves scream.
The shoes in Clarks had low, stumpy heels. They were visitors from a strange world. But were the
y in fashion again now? Not a single magazine article had proclaimed the death of the uncomfortable shoe. At London fashion week, models continued to wobble along the catwalk in vertiginous platforms and there had been no reports in the financial pages of the decline of Manolo Blahnik (who refuses even to make wedges) or Christian Louboutin. Yet the shop seemed to be minting money. I sat down next to an exquisite Italian woman in the kind of skinny jeans that are artfully folded around the ankle, requiring the centuries of visual acuity only granted to a country of people who can wear beige without looking like a geography teacher. She carried a Prada bag, and dozens of shoes lay all around her as she kept trying on more and more pairs. Every time she cast one off, I moved them towards me.
But I had to ask myself whether it is possible to wear sensible shoes when you are no longer young. It is perfectly all right to wear ugly, clumpy clothes when you are 16, but if you wear them when you are 50 it might look as if you never understood style in the first place, or have given up, ­ surrendering to the idea that you can wear a red hat with a purple dress, on the spurious grounds that you are old and what does it matter because no one wants to look at you anyway.
But my God, those shoes were comfortable. It was like wearing slippers. I gave in and bought two pairs: patent T-bars with a spongy wedge, and black leather Mary Janes. Experimentally trying the Mary Janes out on a day when a friend wanted me to accompany her to the flagship Marks & Spencer at Marble Arch, so she could examine every single item of stock, I kept interrogating my feet: "OK down there? Still holding up?" But my feet were doing the job of carrying me around without complaint; they had fallen into silence. By the end of the day I had totally forgotten about them.
In Selfridges, I noticed a fashionable woman surreptitiously slipping off a pair of Clarks shoes and replacing them with heels. Out on the street, women all around me seemed to be wearing shoes that had not been in fashion for 15 years, and they were doing so in defiance of the rules, those intractable fashion rules. Young and old, they walked up and down in boots, flats, sandals, trainers and Clarks clumpy shoes. I'd spent so long in the shop I recognised the styles, such as the Blue Ribbon with its Mary Jane strap and shapely low heel.
This act of collective fashion disobedience is pervasive. Friends tell me that they keep their heels in a drawer in the office, in case they have to look smart for a meeting or a lunch or are going out after work. Women in the City have said that they need heels to look their male colleagues in the eye, but they are getting to work in flats. Few are able to negotiate public transport in the shoes that are being sold in the shops. Wobbling on to a fast-moving escalator during the London rush-hour in 6in heels? Running for a bus? Taking the children to school?
Fashion has given us shoes as decorative objects, not footwear. A couple of years ago, Prada brought out shoes whose heels were shaped as vases. They sent out a specific message about the person wearing them: that they had elevated themselves above such plebeian activities as walking. Like the towering wigs of women in the 18th century, or the hoops and bustles of the 19th, they signal a life lived entirely ornamentally.
Why had I not seen these sensible shoes before? Because they aren't sold in most shoe shops. I would go into the shoe departments of Harrods and Selfridges, mournfully inquiring: do you have anything a bit more comfortable? And the answer came back: no. There were a few mid-height heels, I was told, but they sold out straight away. I wonder why. More often, there were heels, or there were ballet flats, and little in between. On
the Net-a-Porter website, the mid-heels section is full of shoes that are 10cm high. Outside, a vast act of collective disobedience has defied fashion, and yet still the shoe industry is failing to pay any attention. Or more likely, fashion has abandoned function to Clarks. Instead of competing with it, it simply ignores the need to wear shoes you can walk in.
This total disconnect between fashion and what people actually wear, seems to have passed almost unnoticed. Magazines continue to show us ever more crazy shoes. Fashion has decided that there can be nothing in between the 6in heel and the flat. Anything lying between those two points is moderate, average, wearable, and fashion isn't about moderation, it's about excess, stretching the boundaries into new territory. To want to wear a medium, clumpy heel is to surrender to mediocrity.
The first recognition in the media of the public's hunger for comfortable shoes was TV presenter Alexa Chung's rediscovery of Russell & Bromley loafers, a style stocked by the store for decades and which suddenly sold out when she was seen wearing them. She has now moved on to the Salvatore Ferragamo Vara, the low heeled shoe with gilt-trimmed bow beloved of Margaret Thatcher. On
the Clarks website I looked to see how it categorised its clumpy, comfortable shoes which I was now seeing everywhere: they call them workwear. And going to work is what most women do every day, all day. Heels are reserved for evenings out, for parties and clubbing; few women wear them as routine, stand behind a shop counter in them or in front of a class of schoolchildren.
Perhaps the resolute refusal of women in their 20s to abandon sensible shoes goes back to a forgotten time; that of the late 80s and early 90s, when women in their late 20s today were children and teenagers. What did they wear? First they wore trainers, and then they wore clumpy shoes. Only the re-emergence of the ladylike shoe, and the colossal influence of Sex and the City in introducing us to the shoe wardrobe, convinced that generation to get into heels. They fell in love with them as a fashion statement, but continued to wear Uggs, flip-flops and ballet flats for everyday.
I now think we have been the victim of a con trick by the fashion industry. Every woman is supposed to adore gorgeous shoes. Of course it is absolutely correct that they make your legs look longer and your hips slimmer, but if your legs can only be elongated while you're standing or sitting down, there doesn't seem much point to them. I love the extra height heels give me. I like being able to look men in the eye. I like the look of beautiful shoes, but until the manufacturers start including a sedan chair and two attendants with each purchase, I shall wear ugly shoes.
