‘Heeling’ an addiction
I’VE been clearing out cupboards to make a bit of space for some visitors who are due to arrive any day now for an extended visit. There are only two of us living in my house – it really shouldn’t be a problem.
Nor would it be if it wasn’t for my shoes, which fill the floor space in most of the bedroom closets.
I blame the size of my collection on several years spent working in the entertainment business.
Until then, I was happy with a pair each of basic black high heels and flats, replaced when they wore out.
I could do the other stuff – from power suits with pencil skirts to ballgowns – as flamboyantly and effectively as anyone. Shoes? Not so much. My “kugel” colleagues were horrified. I was dragged repeatedly to fancy footwear stores as, like determined drug dealers, they engineered my downfall.
It worked. My resistance crumbled and I was finally, irrevocably hooked.
Wanda Behrens Horrell, writing in Psychology Today, reckons the cliched feminine addiction to high heels is easy to explain: Taller looks thinner, looks sexier.
In any case, she says, Dorothy would never have found her way home from Oz without her ruby-red slippers and Cinderella would certainly not have married Prince Charming if he hadn’t been able to identify her from the dainty glass slipper she left at the ball.
I’m not sure what psychologist Wanda would have made of the “real” Cinderella story. According to Stephen Fry’s madcap general knowledge television quiz show QI, the slippers were actually squirrel fur ( vair) – not glass ( verre ). Popular belief has it that a mistranslation from the French was to blame for the mix-up.
Poppycock, says Fry. “V-A-I-R is still an English word, actually, you’ll find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning ‘squirrel fur’.”
Such fairytales, he points out, were pretty gruesome before they were cleaned up for the kids: “When the Ugly Sisters tried to slip into the slipper, they cut off their toes and their bunions to try and squeeze in and the slippers filled with blood … And the wicked stepmother and the Ugly Sisters were punished by the king. They had to dance themselves to death wearing red-hot iron boots.”
Psycho-babble and fairy-stories aside, I think maybe the real reason women love shoes is that they always fit – even when nothing else does.
Designer Christian Louboutin, whose skyscraper-tall shoes’ distinctive bright red soles are a mark of success (and more money than sense) with celebrities, knows how to milk the obsession – his sadomasochistic beauties fly off the shelf at a starting price of R3 000. A custom-designed pair will set you back at least R33 000.
Luckily for Louboutin, none of his airhead customers has heard of red acrylic paint and spray varnish. Works a treat!
As for my own over-large collection, these days I have a self-imposed rule that if I bring a new pair in, an old pair has to leave. Maybe if I changed that to one in, two out, we’d have room to move.
Today’s Chiel is Stevie Godson. E-mail her at stevieg@wordnerds.co.za