A LIFE IN SHOES

About a zillion years ago, one of my favourite bloggers, Christina at Fashion's Most Wanted, tagged me in a shoe meme. It's taken me such a shamefully long time to pick up the baton, I can't actually remember the rules of the meme, other than one had to post pictures of one's favourite shoes. 


This weekend, however, Mr Trefusis made me sort out my shoe cupboard, and I finally got round to taking some (rather bad) pictures. Like all women I have far too many shoes, yet end up wearing only three pairs, and those are either too worn or too boring to show here. My favourite shoes should really go in the bin - they're completely knackered but they're chocolate brown stilettos, with a very pointy Blahnik-style toe and schiaparelli pink detail and I completely love them.

These are Prada: Black kid with a natural coloured lizardskin and silver piping. Sadly, like their owner , they're getting on a bit and are a little tired and worn.  Nevertheless, every time I slide my feet into them, I feel like Zelda Fitzgerald - without the dodgy alcoholism and mental issues, obviously - but in a jazz age kind of way that makes me want to perch elegantly on a bar stool and knock back a couple of Sidecars.

These are also Prada: fabric with ostrich: I fell in love with the print and the bright turquoise toes and heels. Like all Prada shoes they're very comfortable, but they're a little too distinctive to wear often and so, despite being ten years old, they're still in quite good nick.

Bottega Veneta and my most bargainacious shoes ever: they were twenty-five pounds reduced from £250, presumably because there was no call for orange shoes in London 12 years ago when I bought them. Twenty five pounds. More than anything else, they make me feel like Summer's finally arrived: I like to wear them with a pink linen shift dress and with watermelon pink varnish on my toes.

These are Kurt Geiger - satin with swarovski crystal studded heels and cripplingly uncomfortable - taxi shoes if ever there were any. They also upstage me terribly so, fabulous as they are, I've worn them about twice - once to a Harper's Bazaar party where I had to take paracetamol to be able to keep them on, and then once to a dinner party where I knew I'd be sitting down all the time. Are these what magazines call a statement shoe?

'No one would ever mistake you for my mistress in those shoes,' said Mr Trefusis, rather unflatteringly. I don't for one minute suspect him of having a mistress, but I do know what he means: you'd never slap a super-injunction on someone in Ferragamos.  However, what they lack in vampiness, they make up for in sophistication and I love them passionately not least because they remind me of my honorary grandmother, who had immense style, and swore by cashmere jumpers, linen sheets and Ferragamos with every outfit. 

I couldn't work out why these were the only flat shoes in the shoe cupboard - surely I must have other flats, I thought, casting around for evidence. I found a pair of Converse, a couple of pair of really beaten up ballet flats and (the shame) a pair of frog green Crocs: I seem only to wear flats to get from A to B, and then whip out the heels. I must have a terrible complex about being short, or maybe it's that unconsciously I think it's only worth spanking serious shoe money on what the Tiniest Trefusis calls 'heel-high shoes'. However, these glamorous gold Prada flats make me feel a bit Jacqueline Onassis. Is it just me, or do shoes have a transformative power for every woman? Is it the Cinderella thing all over again?

I couldn't photograph these to save my life - they're purple satin and very high and I wore them when I married Mr Trefusis, but that's another story for another time. They're Kurt Geiger.

My favourite shoes don't belong to me at all - the Tiniest Trefusis wore these silver Kicker boots not long after she first learned to walk.  She's very much her mother's daughter - the first word she ever said was 'Shoe'.  

IN MEMORIAM

So a small trip to buy some shoes turned into something bigger, emotionally-speaking. Doesn't it always? What is it about me and shoes? I've read Freud. He's a pervert and has a very limited imagination.

And I am extremely, grumpily conscious about the limitations of my unconscious.Angst is supposed to have a poetic edge, but mine is merely an epic of endlessly repetitive solipsistic wailing. Less plaintive, more complaintive.

Enough.

Despite someone once telling me that Ferragamos (Ferragami? What is the plural?) were one's feet forcing you to accept middle age (middle age? Hah! Bite me botox-monkey), they've always had a particular relevance for me. As one does slither alluringly into a more grown-up countenance and aesthetic, one becomes more conscious of the style-imprint - an innate sense of what is stylish inherited from those much older, wiser, and proximate than mere fashion magazines. And however groovy one wants to be, sartorial imprinting takes place when one is way pre-season. Way, way pre-season: like between the ages of nine and twelve. It's a very impressionable age.

This explains the ghastliness of the catwalk which seems to endless revisit the car-crash couture of yesteryear. Designers are mostly in their early to mid-thirties so the high-waisted peg top trousers, acid-brights and shoulder pads we're all supposed to embrace S/S 09 have obviously been revived from the days when these Bright Young Things were thumbing through the pages of Smash Hits admiring the crimped hair and pointy shoes of The Bangles and Mel & Kim.

And, indeed, my two key style influencers were more about aching hips than being achingly hip. Both were undeniably aged, yet effortlessly elegant exemplars of classic, timeless style. Both had exceptionally firm opinions on what was acceptable (and everything else was 'common'). Both spent hours leafing through copies of Vogue, Harper's and other women's magazines yet neither bought many clothes, being of the dressmaking generation devoted to Vogue patterns, running up fabulous frocks for a party from an old pair of curtains on a clapped out singer sewing machine.

The first of these childhood fashion icons was, inevitably, my grandmother. Her fervent belief in the power of red lipstick and a smart powder compact (no 'rouge' about which she was inexplicably disapproving), Chanel no.5, the restorative abilities of Arden's Eight Hour Cream, and the importance of high heels turned all these items into my own default fashion setting. She was a woman who adored a hat, and could have made a lampshade look like Philip Treacy. She had a gold bangle she wore high on her upper arm which I thought was the absolute last word in racy sophistication andI was beside myself when it came my way after her death. She strode out in the Cumberland countryside in an ankle length blonde fur coat (awfully transgressive now but screamingly glamourous back then) and spent vast swathes of time rehearsing new purchases of the latest Elizabeth Arden skin creams from the Binn's (now House of Fraser) brochure.

As a child she was a remote and rather chilly figure, not known for her humour and much given to shame-making statements like "no one can accuse me of being a snob: I even talk to the village people". Yet the older I grow, the more I acknowledge her influence on my own attitudes and preoccupations. She had a great love of a bargain, kept slim by taking epsom salts every morning (who knew why? Never been tempted to try it myself), thought tanning was impossibly common and had famously beautiful skin to the day she died as a consequence, and drank whisky every night for'medicinal purposes'.

I think we would have liked each other enormously had she lived.

Her opposite number (not a grandmother of the blood, but very much a grandmother of the spirit) was utterly beyond-trend and immune to the vagaries of fashion. She didn't deviate from a style she'd developed who knew when. The constant was the quality: She wore silk, cashmere, linen, lawn. Her winter coat was the iconic belted Maxmara classic cashmere (did you know they brush up the pile with a scottish thistle before it leaves the factory? You can send it back every ten years to be refurbed with another thistle tickling) But most of all she loved Ferragamo. She had long, elegant, greyhound feet and had their classic pump in a colour to match every outfit.

Every time I walk past Ferragamo and Maxmara on Bond Street I think of her and and her inheritance: firm, if arbitary, opinions on real jewellery when combined with the costume variety, an inexplicable and yet unshakable prejudice against the Duchess of Windsor (whom she'd known whilst in the colonial service in Bermuda), the importance of putting a tin of interesting biscuits out on the bedside table for guests, the necessity of cashmere, good underclothes and smart shoes.

And so it was that I found myself in Ferragamo on monday last, snapping up a pair of scarlet patent high heels with the emblematic grosgrain bow on its narrow toe, in a somewhat belated hommage to both. And later, whilst wearing scarlet lipstick and Chanel No.5, it triggered a wider and altogether unconnected meditation about the aftermath of loss. And I realised that, au fin, that what is left remains forever printed, a tattoo of love, an indelible kiss.

A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING MOURNING

Lately, I have been pondering the legacy of loss. Not loss of possessions-though I'm still mystified by the inexplicable absence from my wardrobe of an exquisite broderie anglaise dress, DVF as if re-imagined byGrace Kelly- but of people.

Some of this loss is merely change: The tectonic plates of relationships shift perceptibly over time, subtly accomodating a changing environment. And the emotional geology moves so gently, so imperceptibly, so accomodatingly, there's no reason to pause,to articulate the difference.

But occasionally, there's rapid climate change, precipitating a catastrophic landslip. The familiar landscape one understood is gone forever. One's compass no longer points north. The map is missing. All one can do is acknowledge the disorientation until one determines to negotiate the new geography.

But whilst blundering about without a theodolite, one occasionally stumbles upon recognisable territory. Astonishingly, the landscape has regenerated in a richer, more fertile form. What was lost is reimagined as a brave new world. This is rare, of course. And precious. And whilst one is groping around trying to find a piece of paper on which to sketch a map of this eden, it's useful to consider what an arse Proust was when he wrote 'the only paradise is paradise lost'.

But of course, there is are things and people one can never regain, and when searching for their traces, there's more to be gained playing archaeologist than mapmaker.

All these weighty and much over-metaphored thoughts were inspired, as ever, by the superficial. One would never normally expect to start an archaeological expedition in Ferragamo, but that's where this meditation on loss and its legacy began.

Despite Mr Wilde insisting that only the truly serious could ever be deeply trivial, the substance of that meditation will have to wait for the next post. I've pulled something over-extending that metaphor, so I'll have to apply deep heat and take a handful of nurofen before I can summon the strength to kick out of the pretentious, oblique and portenteous prose I seem to have trapped myself in tonight. Hmmmm....

HUNT THE SLIPPER

One day I must get over my addiction to lunchtime blowdries- it's hardly pro-credit crunch, and despite giving up Starbucks completely in order to offset the cost (though this was more a strike against American imperialism than an act of financial necessity) I seem to have convinced myself it's necessary to the proper commissioning of my job. After all, I can hardly be expected to function effectively with a 'hair-don't', and I need my self-belief in exactly the right place if I'm to rally the troops and drive us onto greater glory. I'm trying to convince everyone that the current economic climate is just our Agincourt, and not our Battle of Yorktown. I expect Henry V's prototype Purdy was absolutely le dernier cri, A/W 1415 and just the fillip he needed before he cried "once more into the breach dear friends".

But as usual, I digress and it's not the hair that's troubling me as I stare into the full length salon mirror opposite. It's the shoes. More specifically, a pale blue and almost impressively ugly pair of MBT's which look utterly appalling with this season's keynote grey tights and YSL-inspired cinched in peplum jacket over black pencil skirt. This look craves vertiginous heels with cruelly pointed toes: assertive, purposeful, ball-breaker stilettos with a touch of the dominatrix about them. It doesn't work with trainers. How has it come to this? Am I not the last person you'd expect to sacrifice style for comfort? Oh hear ye, all ye style victims: the day of judgement will come when God will punish you for your Vanity. As I am now, so you will be. You knoweth not the time not the hour etc etc etc.

Hmmm. I think we all know it's not God who's doing the punishing here. I am the author of my own discontent, with a big toe joint so agonisingly painful that even I can't feel the pain and do it anyway. I'm now totally over empathising with Cinderella's uglier sister in the terrifyingly grim, Grimm's version: you know the one - the only way the uglier stepsister can jam her foot into the glass slipper is to slice off her toes, and away she goes with the Prince till a bird grasses her up, flying after them tweeting 'tirrou, tirrou, there's blood in the shoe'. Nasty little sneak.

But, obviously, slicing off my toes, whilst tempting, is impractical. So I take myself off to the Royal Ballet's pet podiatrist, figuring he'd understand all about women who uncomplainingly wear crippling shoes for a living.

He looks a bit like a superannuated Patrick Swayze. Maybe an early brush with Dirty Dancing got him into the whole foot business in the first place as he ushers me to his consulting couch at one end of his tiny office and I find myself quietly mumuring, "no one puts Baby in the corner".

Half an hour and £90 later he assures me that the problem has everything to do with the way I walk and nothing to do with my addiction to fabulous shoes. This is cold comfort, since he’s also told me that I have arthritis in my big toe (arthritis? Go directly to smelly Old People’s Home, do not pass Go, do not collect £200), and another unpronounceable issue that he believes is totally curable if I wear custom-made splints on my feet every day and do vast amounts of physio. And yes, I can still wear my more fanciful heels. He says.

However, when I try to jam my feet into my best shoes whilst wearing the splints, I again know exactly how the ugly sisters felt about bloody Cinderella. The splints force my feet into such an anatomically correct position, there isn’t a single beautiful shoe I can cram myself into.

I’m devastated: I feel like the basis of my entire sex appeal has been summarily excised (and am probably still stinging with the granny-implications of the arthritis). Will I be shopping in Clarks from now on? Will Velcro become my fastener of choice? Do I really care about being able to be able to walk without pain? Is there such a thing as a sexy flat shoe?

In the meantime, before I can, ahem, hot foot it to Ferragamo in search of a sexy flat, let’s hope people are distracted by the great hair…

Peter Norman, Podiatrist: The Third Space, London W1 Tel: 0207 439 7332