Oooooh, because those are cute. I don't know what clothes I like in the abstract, but I can tell cute shoes from not-cute shoes when I see them. All shoe stores have the same thing all the time. Like wedges this year? I don't like wedges at all, because the arch between the heel and the ball is a potentially pretty line, and why arbitrarily eliminate a bonus potentially pretty line for a large piece of cork. So I was super bummed that when I needed sandals to go with the dress to go to the wedding they had to be wedges. Now I have one pair, but they aren't nearly as cute as the shoes that tore your feet up.
They are nice, aren't they? That's what kills me about it. I look at other women's feet, and they look so well put together and attractive, while I shlumpf along in my Velcro sport-sandals. And I think to myself, "They can't all be suffering, right? Pretty shoes can't all be painful. I just have to be sensible about shopping." And then, every couple of years, when the memory fades, I buy a pair, and they leave me weeping with pain.
Maybe I just have particularly delicate feet (not to look at, certainly) but I can't understand how people wear shoes like this all the time.
Lizardbreath, I am you. My problem is that I can't find anything with a fucking heel that doesn't make me want to die. I'm 5'1". Women my height pretty much have to wear heels to "dress up" according to current fashion mores. I thought maybe that it was just that I was buying cheap crap, and that's why they hurt my feet, so I dropped $100 on a pair of Franco Sartos. After five blocks, I had a blister on my heel that made me unable to wear anything but flip-flops for like a week.
LB, I'm totally with you. I finally found 2 pairs of flip-flops that worked (one casual, one a little dressier) but still haven't found any dressy sandals that are OK.
My working theory is that my feet are slightly wider than "normal" width, but not necessarily wide enough for "wide" width, and so I end up wearing normal width shoes, which feel like shit when they're cute (read: cut into the sides of your feet).
I don't know how they wear them all the time either. I wear pretty shoes on the rare occasion that I'm not in jeans and a t-shirt. I just expect them to hurt. Maybe very expensive pretty shoes are different? That would be worth the extra money, if I knew they wouldn't hurt.
Intruding on what my have been a question posed solely to the women in the Unfoggedtariat, I would say that as cute as LizardBreath's new sandals appear to be, I cannot fathom why women wear shoes that hurt their feet. I have heard (particularly in the days of my youth) lots of guys commenting on women's appearances (not that I would do such a thing, of course) and I do not remember anyone saying "wow, hot shoes"! So I am not sure you are feeling this pain for us. I say, just say no to uncomfortable shoes. If enough women do it, someone will make comfortable shoes for you.
6, see 3, at least for some definitions of "very expensive."
Logically, I don't think wearing shoes without socks is possible. Unless you're wearing sandals or moccasins.
Those are cute. For walking, I'd think you'd do better with the same style, but closed-toe and/or with a higher vamp. I had a pair of fabric mules pretty much like that but with a closed, pointy toe a couple years ago and I walked them basically to death. What you want if you're going to walk in a mule is a high vamp (that is, the back part of the fabric on that particular shoe should be cut higher on your foot), because that means the foot won't shift around on your foot as much, which is what causes the blisters. And a closed toe, obviously, means there's no front edge to chafe.
That said: something like this (only, since you're going for the grownup look, ideally in nude nylong rather than cute colored cotton) will probably make those particular shoes wearable. Also, insoles: Dr. Scholl's makes insoles for open-back shoes, now, as well as open toe. Again, insoles will keep the bed of the shoe from sliding under your foot. Really, *any* shoe is going to do better with insoles imho. Heels are *so* much more wearable with cushioned insoles at the front. I've got a fabulous pair of pointy high heels that have an incredibly flexible rubber sole (which, thank god, is becoming quite popular on heels). So flexible, in fact, that the open part of the shoe has elastic around it, and the shoe will actually *curl up* like the Wicked Witch's shoes that and a pair of nice insoles mean I can wear 'em all day
The reason sandals all have narrow straps nowadays is b/c that's what's in fashion. Five years ago, it was thick straps. However! I found something called "Airplus Love My Straps Strap Liners" at the drugstore recently; thick rubbery/plastic straps about 2 inches long that you glue inside the straps so they won't chafe. Bought 'em, but haven't yet tried 'em.
The trick to walking in cute shoes is basically to find a style that's constructed so it doesn't slide around on your foot. The height is less of an issue than the movement, b/c you can always cushion the ball of your foot with an insole. (Although you're right; mules at that heel height are eminently walkable, if they're cut right.)
Idealist -- I reckon you have heard acquaintances comment on the hottness or nottness of a passing wench's legs -- this is the form a comment on the lady's shoes would take.
8 - that counts as expensive for me.
7 - Your friends may not have noticed the shoes, but they probably notice the overall look, which the shoes contributed to. And by 'contributed to', I mean that the heels made her butt and chest stick out.
7: No, it's not for you.
Re. expense: my fabulous mules were like $40 and made in China (which is usually the kiss of death). I bought them in a rush to go with an outfit and didn't expect them to be really comfy, but boy howdy. Loved 'em. Wish I hadn't worn them out. (Which gets to the other thing: if you find a good comfy pair of dressy shoes, it doesn't hurt to go back and buy a second pair. Sadly, my rubber-soled heels were the last pair in my size.)
9 -- sneakers can be worn sockless.
6, 8: And see the pictured shoes. They aren't the most expensive possible shoes, but they're pretty pricey.
7: You know, I'm married with kids. I'm not trying to get laid (and even when I was, I wasn't pursuing it with the sort of single-minded intensity that would drive me to accepting pain). I mostly do boycott shoes like this -- this is my first pair in years.
But I can't find acceptably formal shoes that don't hurt. I'm a lawyer. Once the business casual summer season is over, I have to go to work in a suit -- I can't work at my job without formal business clothing. I find some ways to cheat; I've got a pair of men's loafers I wear with pants, and in the winter I can find some acceptable looking comfortable flats (although that's also not easy.)
It drives me nuts.
(also topsiders though I suppose they are sort of in the same category as moccasins.)
I used to love shoes with heels, but I think if you're going to wear pretty shoes, you need to take taxis. I've seen a few women stomp around in spike heels as if they were normal, but usually they're the fairy-like type with the little hollow bird bones. Maybe the $500 kind are less painful? At least the inexpensive ones are more likely to have badly placed seams and stitching.
A couple of years ago I went rock climbing and tore a tendon in my arch, and now it's all orthopedic all the time. (I can wear a ballet flat for a couple of hours, but after that it hurts.) All of a sudden all the regular shoes look so pretty.
The thing is, there seem to be women who wear heels just for fun! I see women all the time wearing crazy heels with jeans at a bar, or to fucking school (yes, I hate my school), or walking down the street in a not-particularly-dressy outfit. Are these women a) suckers for pain b) made differently than me somehow, or c) buying different shoes?
And, you know, why are painful shoes fashionable even for dress-up? Who the hell started accepting this?
But I can't find acceptably formal shoes that don't hurt. I'm a lawyer. Once the business casual summer season is over, I have to go to work in a suit -- I can't work at my job without formal business clothing. I find some ways to cheat; I've got a pair of men's loafers I wear with pants, and in the winter I can find some acceptable looking comfortable flats (although that's also not easy.)
It drives me nuts.
To be clear, I was not trying to say that it was not fucked up or that it should not drive you nuts. I was (inartfully, I guess) trying to agree and add evidence in support.
Crap, could I possibly have more typos? I need more coffee.
I accept it because all the cool girls are doing it.
It's obviously done for men, and it's obviously all about male sadism. No different than foot binding in China. A woman is more sexy when she is in pain.
And exactly what I wonder to your last question, although I'll swear it's not (c). They're either made differently from you and me (which, sorry B., is all I can take away from your 10.) or they think suffering is worth it to look cute.
This post is very apropos for me. I have an interview tomorrow, and I'm going to be wearing a (really cute, I might add) skirt suit, with which flats are just not acceptable. So, I'll be putting these on outside the building, and taking them off just after.
I think B may be right about insoles, though, cause these motherfuckers kill the ball of my foot.
First Shanghai, now shoes! If you could only blog about sushi, Felix Guattari, and fabric dye (sequentially might be better than simultaneously) Unfogged would pretty much be the best. blog. ever. Have you looked at Giraudons at all? I note that there's a store in some part of New York called Chelsea and I always used to get fairly cute shoes from there (by mail, no less) without hurting my feet too much.
The thing is, I don't think you can have really delicate shoes that don't hurt. Some people have Feet Not of Clay But of Iron, and they can wear dainty shoes and walk for miles. Not me. I wear Campers (which are nice since they use the same sole-patterns for different shoes and therefore you can try on one pair in the US and then order from Spain with confidence) or Trippens (similar procedure with the soles, only German) I'm really fond of the a style called "Vivienne" which is a sort of flat, strange, ankle-wrapping pseudo-ancient-Greece-inflected maryjane, suitable for wear with skirts and pants, with and without socks. They also have some more delicate, um, elk-leather shoes that might be more suited to formal, lawyerly work. I got my first pair from Ped Shoes in Seattle and now simply have my shoes flown in from the Continent, which makes me feel at least two or three socio-economic brackets higher than reality warrants.
To answer the question, I, a woman, can't wear heels or tiny shoes made of stiff leather. I have so spoiled myself by wearing flat, well-fitting shoes (I was in my late teens when all that grunge-and-combat-boots stuff came along) that I find it hard to wear any kind of narrow heel, even a low one. Once I saw some Isaac Mizrahi couture shoes on sale in my size (Like cartoon fifties shoes! So tall! So pointy!) and tried them on and when I put my weight on my feet I felt like my feet were suddenly on fire.
What I'd really like to know is this: since New Yorkers walk a lot, how do women handle all those upmarket shoes? I walk a lot here in the provinces, and I can't wear them. The women who wear them here manifestly don't walk more than from car to office in them.
First Shanghai, now shoes! If you could only blog about sushi, Felix Guattari, and fabric dye (sequentially might be better than simultaneously) Unfogged would pretty much be the best. blog. ever. Have you looked at Giraudons at all? I note that there's a store in some part of New York called Chelsea and I always used to get fairly cute shoes from there (by mail, no less) without hurting my feet too much.
The thing is, I don't think you can have really delicate shoes that don't hurt. Some people have Feet Not of Clay But of Iron, and they can wear dainty shoes and walk for miles. Not me. I wear Campers (which are nice since they use the same sole-patterns for different shoes and therefore you can try on one pair in the US and then order from Spain with confidence) or Trippens (similar procedure with the soles, only German) I'm really fond of the a style called "Vivienne" which is a sort of flat, strange, ankle-wrapping pseudo-ancient-Greece-inflected maryjane, suitable for wear with skirts and pants, with and without socks. They also have some more delicate, um, elk-leather shoes that might be more suited to formal, lawyerly work. I got my first pair from Ped Shoes in Seattle and now simply have my shoes flown in from the Continent, which makes me feel at least two or three socio-economic brackets higher than reality warrants.
To answer the question, I, a woman, can't wear heels or tiny shoes made of stiff leather. I have so spoiled myself by wearing flat, well-fitting shoes (I was in my late teens when all that grunge-and-combat-boots stuff came along) that I find it hard to wear any kind of narrow heel, even a low one. Once I saw some Isaac Mizrahi couture shoes on sale in my size (Like cartoon fifties shoes! So tall! So pointy!) and tried them on and when I put my weight on my feet I felt like my feet were suddenly on fire.
What I'd really like to know is this: since New Yorkers walk a lot, how do women handle all those upmarket shoes? I walk a lot here in the provinces, and I can't wear them. The women who wear them here manifestly don't walk more than from car to office in them.
I was going on a date with an investment banker and before going out our mutual friend told me quite bluntly, "He's worth 20 million dollars." I hadn't really asked, or cared before she mentioned it, but was a little disconcerted by the description.
For the date, I guess I was trying to live up to some notion of the type of woman a guy like that dates, and I put on a pair of really fancy new shoes. I ended up having to walk a bit to get to the restaurant where I was meeting him, and my new shoes nearly killed me along the way. I was in so much pain that I had to grip the bottom of my chair to keep from passing out. I said nothing, and couldn't concentrate at all, mostly because the only lucid thought going through my head was, "20 million dollars."
I really don't think I said a word the whole night.
18: [Waving] Hi. I do this sometimes. (Though I also wear perfectly acceptable educated-middle-class chick thick-soled shoes a lot of the time.)
19: Most people walk from their front door to their car, from their car to their desk, and once in a while to the printer. Or they walk from door to car to door and then stand around at a party with a drink in their hand. Therefore, as long as you can stand in the shoes (which again, insoles), you're fine. Walking is a whole different ballgame.
Therefore, as long as you can stand in the shoes (which again, insoles), you're fine. Walking is a whole different ballgame.
See, that's literally insane.
20 million is a lot of dollars.
33: Not if you don't walk much it's not.
That said, I don't buy shoes I can't walk in. Okay, actually I did do that about a year ago (huge sale!), and it was dumb. (Hence me buying the strap-cushioning things; I realy do know better than narrow strappy shoes, but they were so cute! And so hugely on sale!) But I swear to god I have three-inch heels that I walk in just fine, and kitten-heeles mules too.
I have to admit though that this season's attempt to replace the kitten-heeled mules was unsuccessful. Everything was cut too low in the vamp, like the ones you bought. I am sad, as kitten-heeled mules are such great summer shoes precisely b/c one can walk in them (also, if closed toe, you don't have to worry about the state of your toenails).
The walking prohibition just does not work if you live in a big city, though (which baffles me, since it's people who live in NY that are responsible for all this fashion nonsense anyway, right?). For example, to get from home to work I had to walk 4 blocks (.5 miles) on the front-end and 2 (.25 miles) on the back end. That's a total of a mile and a half every day, at least, not to mention trekking out three blocks and back to get an overpriced Cosí salad at lunch. Which is fine in normal shoes. In heels, it's intolerable.
You'd definitely want 20 million in big bills and not, say, rolls of quarters.
Hey, Frowner, your link to Trippens doesn't work. Is their site down, or should the link be different?
I read B's 10 and thought "damn, that's how I would like to attack the problem, like an engineer."
Now I'm sure people have and do, but the enormous range in women's size, weights and distribution, leaving corresponding-or-not differences in the shape and individual histories of the feet, make solutions complicated. I'll bet there are solutions, tradecraft, which as everybody suspects, cost. I wish there were widely-available technical treatments so we could start thinking like B, only with graphs and equations. A woman who went to MIT and has been repeatedly burned by this would eat up a treatise about this in nothing flat.
Common sense suggests that the bitches silvana wants to kill are some combination of physically lucky, innured to pain, and wearing expensive solutions.
I swear to god I have three-inch heels that I walk in just fine
See, if you really can walk a half-mile in any pair of three-inch heels, I think you and I must be made differently. Which is probably true.
The big bills would be less swimmable-in than the change.
I admit that I don't understand why (or if) women in New York who depend on public transportation wear heels on a daily basis. I wouldn't.
Now I'm sure people have and do, but the enormous range in women's size, weights and distribution, leaving corresponding-or-not differences in the shape and individual histories of the feet, make solutions complicated.
Absolute nonsense. When was the last time you bought a pair of shoes that had you in severe pain? Are men more standardized than women?
I wish there were widely-available technical treatments so we could start thinking like B, only with graphs and equations.
What I wish is that thinness weren't prized above everything else in this fucking world, so that the marginal thinning effect given to one's legs by wearing a pair of heels wouldn't be worth pain to millions of women.
It isn't the height of the heels, as long as the heel is thick. I can stand and walk comfortably in my boots with three and a half inch heels (because if I am going to wear heels, they're gonna count). There's other reasons cute shoes hurt, like straps that chafe when your foot slides. Those hurt me, but I just assume that other cleverer women found the shoes that don't hurt them.
40: What size do you wear, S? I'll pack my black heels when I come to Chicago next month and we can get together and you can try them on, if you're a 9.
And this:
I have to admit though that this season's attempt to replace the kitten-heeled mules was unsuccessful. Everything was cut too low in the vamp, like the ones you bought.
See, you like and tolerate cute shoes, and you can end up saying that you couldn't buy summer shoes this year because everything was unwearably uncomfortable. That's crazy.
I lasted one week in NYC before I had to buy all new shoes. I used to wear 1.5" - 2" heels, which were fine for the car -> office -> car -> home walking B describes but that won't cut it for NYC walking. All flats, all the time for me now (or, at most, about a .5" heel like I'm wearing today).
The heels-with-jeans thing baffles me.
Absolute nonsense. When was the last time you bought a pair of shoes that had you in severe pain? Are men more standardized than women?
LB, mens shoes are fairly normally-shaped flats. There's simply less that can go wrong. It's not that men are more standardized than women, it's that their shoes are less weird.
What IDP said is not nonsense. And I do suspect that, if one is willing to spend enough money (which many be an unfortunately large amount), one could get cute, comfortable shoes for any feet.
46: I'm a 9. It's a deal.
That's the other thing, with this stupid shoe nonsense. I'm already self-conscious about my feet, because I have come to the conclusion that they are (proportionally) large. Seriously, my friend who is a foot taller than me wears a size 10. The average height of the American woman is 5'4". I'm 5'1". I think the average shoe size is 8. Wtf.
47: Eh. It's annoying when the year's styles are stupid, but I feel the same way when everything is the stupid 70s-retro gypsies, tramps and thieves look, too, because that look is awful for me. When you find something that works for you, buy it; when it doesn't work, don't. I don't think men buy new shoes every season, do they?
When was the last time you bought a pair of shoes that had you in severe pain?
You wear shoes comparable to the shoes I wear that don't have you in severe pain every day. It's the design, high-heel pump or sandal, that makes the problem; of course those shoes would kill me — you've seen me.
I heard somewhere that transvestites have confronted this problem and written about it. There'd be your equivalent for me, from a strictly technical point of view.
I don't think men buy new shoes every season, do they?
I bought a pair of tennis shoes at Target last year for $7.50. Every other pair of shoes I own is at least four years old.
yay! best topic EVAR! my thoughts:
1. as to the question of walking around all day in heels and not having it hurt your calves or arch or the ball of your foot too badly, this is just a matter of practice and there may well be some people who can never go around in very high heels comfortably. (I walk around in heels quite happily, but I've been practicing for my whole damn life.) but, this hypothetical person should still be able to find comfortable shoes of this type (lower heels).
2. getting blisters is a separate question. up to a point, more expensive shoes are better in terms of fit. but this is not universally true, since it may have much more to do with the style, the last the shoe manufacturer uses, etc.
3. i agree with bitchphd that the issue with these is your foot sliding around (unless they are really too narrow). put in the insoles so that your feet don't slide around in the shoe and the problem may go away. don't put the shoes back on immediately, of course, but even if the blisters are not totally gone you can do it with clear bandaids.
4. the shoe repair guy is your friend. you know, by the locksmith and the dry cleaners? that guy. they can put gel insole things in (great for preventing the pain in the balls of your feet you get after lots of time in stilettoes). they can also put little soft moleskin type things in the backs of pumps that are chafing your heel at the top of the shoe (like this pair I have right now that are sooo cute but they make my feet bleed.) if it's a place where the edge of the upper part of the shoe is rubbing in just one place, they can sometimes put soft stuff there. they can also stretch shoes. replacing the little rubber thing on the heel and putting a non-slip sole on the bottom of leather shoes--these are all good things and cheap.
5. the plain fact of the matter is, lots of shoes are just painful for any woman's particular feet. if you feel any pressure at all in the shoe store as you walk around, any ever so slight chafing, don't get them. unless you're me and they're rilly cute, in which case go right on, which brings us to:
6. lots of what we call "breaking in" shoes is just breaking in your feet. putting the band-aid on and wearing them anyway will eventually result either in stretching the shoe appropriately or building up calluses. it's win-win!
7. rather than obsessing over finding this one perfect pair you should suck it up and buy more shoes, but not expensive ones. one pair will turn out to fit great and you can just go back and buy more of them. another pair may not be totally comfortable, but fine on a day when you know you won't be doing as much walking around, and you won't wear them two days in a row. problem solved.
8. you can look perfectly professional in various types of flats. ballet slipper types? butter-soft leather driving shoes, like tod's, except maybe not because they cost a million $$$?
9. guys claiming they don't care about women's shoes is total bullshit. "you crazy chicks!" yes, guys often don't bother to learn about whether wedges are in, but they sure as hell notice someone in a skirt and mile-high shoes vs a skirt and flip-flops. which is not to say they might not prefer the latter, but they notice. isn't "shouldn't wear heels" on ogged's "shouldn't-wear-makeup" hippy chick checklist for ogged approval?
I was an 8 before I had PK, and I'm 5'5". The advantage to being a 9 is that it's slightly easier to find shoes in your size on sale.
I'm beginning to realize that part of the reason I'm such an apparent fashion victim is that when I do find cute shoes (or good bras) that are comfortable, I go on and on about it. It's not that I've got a closet full of stilettos; it's that I have a couple of good pairs of heels (and admittedly, more than a couple of merely "okay" ones that I can only wear for particular kinds of occasions that don't include schlepping around a city all day long).
You wear shoes comparable to the shoes I wear that don't have you in severe pain every day.
Yeah, but I have to scour the stores to find them. I'm not objecting that heels exist, I'm objecting that I can spend weeks looking in every shoe store I pass for low-heeled sandals that don't attach with velcro, and I can't find someone to sell them to me.
Look at the kind of thing people are saying -- order shoes without trying them on from Europe? Wait a year until something you can wear comes into style? The problem isn't that I'm insisting on wearing difficult-to-design shoes, and then complaining when they hurt, it's that it's a nightmare trying to find work-appropriate shoes that aren't nuts.
Alameida's 7 is very wise. I think that's the answer right there to how the heel-wearing women do it.
kitten-heeled mules
This whole genetic engineering thing has gone too far.
Or, given that I crossed with Alameida:
you should suck it up and buy more shoes, but not expensive ones. one pair will turn out to fit great and you can just go back and buy more of them. another pair may not be totally comfortable, but fine on a day when you know you won't be doing as much walking around, and you won't wear them two days in a row.
Buy multiple pairs of shoes in the hope that you'll accidentally run across something non-painful? Fuck, man, I'm not interested in shoes. I don't want shoes to be a goddamn research project. I want to be able to walk into a goddamn shoe store and walk out with something that looks respectably like a lawyer might wear it with a suit without having to guess whether it'll cut my feet up.
I agree with 57. I mean, the fact that alameida has so much advice about finding a pair of heels that doesn't kill you indicates to me that the heel market is fucking insane.
The first question that pops to mind is, why don't shoemakers make shoes with things included (insoles and whatever else) to make them comfortable? It's just another symptom of women's clothes and shoes being made of shit quality, even when they're expensive.
57: That is a problem, but trying to buy *anything* buy scouring stores for a week (or weeks) almost never works. If you're looking for something specific and can't find it, you end up buying the closest approximation and then being unhappy with it.
OTOH, if you poke around and window shop occasionally and happen to see something you like and it fits and looks good and is comfortable, buy it immediately. Then when the occasion comes along, you've already got it and don't have to run around from shop to shop getting increasingly pissed off.
The first question that pops to mind is, why don't shoemakers make shoes with things included (insoles and whatever else) to make them comfortable?
Yes. What the fuck is "Well, if you spend a hundred and fifty bucks on a pair of shoes, it may be possible to buy additional aftermarket alterations that will make them wearable"?
guys claiming they don't care about women's shoes is total bullshit
No, no it isn't. Holding up Ogged's crazy-ass requirements for women doesn't count as good evidence.
Good stores will often give you insoles when you buy shoes. And when you find the good pair, buy the shoe trees and keep them in the box and they'll last way way longer. It's basically the exact same theory as the wear-clunky-comfy-shoes thing: be practical, buy things you expect to last, and take good care of them. It's just that yeah, "fashion" requires a certain awareness and investment of time (and money). You can easily ignore it and be both presentable and comfortable, thank god! which is a huge advance; but if you want to be fashionable then, like any other hobby, it's something you're going to be better at if you practice it fairly regularly.
I used to think that Compeed was mainly bought by people (generally of the masculine variety) who spent their weekends tramping all over the countryside getting blisters. Then I mentioned this in female company and learned that about 90% of Compeed's production goes into women's handbags to enable them to wear startlingly painful and injurious shoes.
Given that flat shoes are not work appropriate, is there a good reason why you can't have detachable heels? Walk around in flats, then as soon as you get into the office, twist and click the heels into their sockets on the back of the shoe sole.
If you're looking for something specific and can't find it, you end up buying the closest approximation and then being unhappy with it.
I know what you're saying, generally, but the problem is that the default shoe is exquisitely painful -- wearable is a freak exception. If I break the butter dish, and want to but a new one that week, I won't get exactly what I want. But I won't get stuck with a butter dish where the butter is attached with spikes to the underside of the dish and smears all over whatever you put it down on -- any butter dish you buy will work okay as a butter dish, even if it's not the color you wanted.
If I do the same thing with shoes -- buying without months of research and knowledge -- I get shoes that don't work as shoes.
64: Dude, you're just wrong. Why is it, then, that women in porn are wearing fucking heels when they're having sex? High heels are a trigger that says "sexy," and it's one that men notice.
Given that flat shoes are not work appropriate, is there a good reason why you can't have detachable heels?
You know, I wear mostly flats, but I have a hard time finding them too -- you can't just walk into a shoe store and count on finding a pair of flats, you have to search them out.
Find shoes you like, and buy several pair online. That's what I do for my work shoes, and it has worked out nicely.
1. My sister is one of those women who likes wearing heels. I have studied her for years. It genuinely doesn't bother her. However, it now occurs to me that virtually all of her walking is done on carpeted surfaces. Hm.
2. B's and Alameida's tips are great, especially finding an assortment of little cushion-y doodads as needed.
3. Talking to a Shoe Guy is always recommended. Even Shoe Guys with limited English often manage to communicate their wisdom very effectively.
4. Actually walking around the shoe store for at least five minutes has saved me from buying some shoes that seemed deceptively comfortable at first fit.
5. The real problem -- and I think LB sort of communicated this -- is that this all takes time. And the difference between a half-hour with Consumer Reports to research a washing machine you're going to own for 15 years versus the time and effort needed to chase down shoes that are available, reasonably seasonable/not glaringly out of fashion, moderately comfortable or at least adjustable to comfort with aforementioned cushions, not to mention affordable....ye gods and little fishes. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. And after all that you're lucky to get a few years' worth of wear out of 'em.
(6. Although getting a fashion-minded friend to do the legwork (ha ha) does cut off some of the wasted time. And zappos.com has free shipping, which allows one to order fast and painlessly in the middle of the night and then send back everything that doesn't fit.)
Why is it, then, that women in porn are wearing fucking heels when they're having sex?
See, that's why they call them "fucking heels," not "walking heels." I'm sure those heels are quite comfortable when your feet are up in the air and not supporting your weight.
70: That is, in fact, a reasonable solution, and what I need to do. I've been living for about a decade off three or four pairs of Ferragamo flats my mother bought me when I started law school, but they've all gotten entirely ragged by now, and I can't really afford to just replace them (oh, I suppose I could, but I can't make myself spend that kind of money. Mom was buying them in Italy during some sort of hyper-sale.).
I need to suck it up and buy a bunch of new shoes for the fall, but I hate it.
LB's kind of got a point here. it's like the patriarchy and I are in a happy, mutually satisfying bdsm relationship! I think I should come to NYC and take LB shopping. or maybe we should all just accept that cute shoes hurt? but just today I wore this pair of 70's candies I got from a thrift store that are perfectly comfortable, though 3 1/3 inches high. one piece of molded plastic for the bottom and a leather upper. I only have a few truly expensive shoes: 1 pair of manolo blahniks I got for my wedding (very comfortable) 1 pair of prada spectator shoes with a vertiginous but wide heel (v. c.) and one pair of miu miu suede platform shoes that tie on with long suede ties (v.c but scary high, even for me). I think the fact is that some women are just putting up with pain for cute shoes while the superrich waltz around all comfy, plus they take taxis everywhere. bastards. IIRC I left about 25 pair of shoes and boots in storage in the us and have maybe 40 prs here. if I look in my heart I have to say lots of those are uncomfortable. some have the bleeding problem. so, yeah. when people run in circles it's a very very mad world.
38: The site isn't working. But it's really nice when it's up! Seriously, the money for certain styles of Trippen is worth it. Also, they're all socially responsible and that. And you can return them as long as you don't buy a custom color/style combination. They're also pretty soft. None of the leather-lined styles have given me blisters, even straight out of the box.
Fundamentally, I am a failure as a womanly woman. I look silly in dainty frilly things, make-up, and fancy hair. (And this is not to impugn people who wear these things--I am just not a modern type, and the modern Lucky mag/Elle/kitten heel styles don't work on me) So my interest in visiting the shoe repair guy for various fixes for tiny, strappy shoes that will make me look weirdly matronly by contrast (and that's how it works--I'm not a frilly type, so frilly things make me look like I'm about fifteen years older and trying to dress young)...well, my interest in that strategy is minimal. If you look good in little shoes, that's another story.
Plus the thrill of Packages Delivered From Abroad! How glamourous is that?
I should ask my wife to comment on this thread. She manages a fairly high-end shoe place. Even she struggles to find cool high-heeled shoes that aren't uncomfortable after a full-day's work.
Her current work-shoes are:
http://www.russellandbromley.co.uk/image.pl?id=301042
and if guys don't care about shoes, why have three different male acquaintances complimented me on my shoes in the last week and a half? and not just one one pair but like, you always have such nice shoes I don't know how you can walk in those heels blah blah? and only one of those guys was gay? riddle me that!
I think I should come to NYC and take LB shopping
This, certainly.
67: Really? Both grad school city and podunk town have at least two shops that carry plenty of reliably comfortable and not terribly frumpy women's shoes: Clarks, Aquatalia, Aerosoles, for the more conservative, Camper or Tsubo if you're going for a hipper look. Women who won't wear uncomfortable shoes are a huge market and there are definitely brands that cater to us.
and if guys don't care about shoes, why have three different male acquaintances complimented me on my shoes in the last week and a half?
Any of them give you a soulful look after saying that? Because that's more or less the only reason I compliment women on their shoes (except for the ones who wear those sandals that look like the old Esprit sandals--I love those).
Mmm. And look plausibly wearable -- while I'm bitching about heels, if the heel is wide enough, as on those, height isn't that much of a problem. I lived in a pair of 2 1/2 inch clunky black things in the late 90's and early 2000s until the leather of the uppers literally wore out. And then I couldn't replace them because wide heels were out of style.
81: maybe a little bit soulful. but they still had to notice to make it work, right? the shoes in 76 are cute. I think of that kind of shoe as a comfortable shoe (stipulating that we're talking about heels): the toe is closed and round, so no squeezing into points; the heel is wide so they're stable to walk in; the straps are wide enough not to bite.
80: I just googled Tsubo and came up with six pages of sneakers. While I love sneakers, if they aren't making shoes I could wear with a suit, they're not what I'm talking about.
Several remarks made here have driven cold slivers of fear into my heart, metaphorically speaking. Are flats really, seriously not work-appropriate, even in fancy jobs, even in New York? Really? (I don't even wear a serious heel to a job interview--I have one pair of calf maryjanes with a 1.5 inch heel for that) I will never leave Large Provincial City if this is the case. In fact, I feel even luckier than usual to live here.
I've been living for about a decade off three or four pairs of Ferragamo flats my mother bought me when I started law school, but they've all gotten entirely ragged by now, and I can't really afford to just replace them (oh, I suppose I could, but I can't make myself spend that kind of money.
Well that's it right there. If you know what kind of shoes fit and are comfortable, and you can wear them for ten years, why won't you spend the money to replace them instead of trying to find something cheaper and being frustrated at not being able to find it? When you find something that works, do it. Instead of scouring town for random mules, scour town for Ferragamos on sale.
I had never ever worn heels, and then I started to get frustrated by the lack of flattish sandals that look nice or aren't basically leather flip flops (which I can't wear if I don't want my legs and back to start killing me).
So I bought a pair of cute wedges with a moderately high heel. They didn't cause blisters, but walking around in them made me feel hobbled. I was hugely self-conscious because I felt like I was walking like an idiot taking mincing little baby steps.
I don't really understand the whole shoe thing anyway. In my house I'm always barefoot, even in the winter. For 90% of this summer I've worn black converse.
I do like boots though.
re: 79
And only 350 dollars a pair!
re: 83
And yeah, I gather they are quite comfortable/practical. Despite the height of the heel.
84: Professional, conservative work shoes = Naturalizer, Aerosoles, etc. No, they tend not to be cute or trendy, but that's because professional/conservative =/ cute and trendy, right? The cute/trendy work-appropriate shoe is a rare find, to be snatched at when happened across. But it is shy, and will hide if you are searching for it.
I'm surprised by 76. I'd immediately mark those as "uncomfortable" (are those *wood* soles? At that height?) and not even try them on.
yeah, what bphd said in 86. find out what big stores carry ferragamo and then go during the big whatever sale (labor day?). get ninja and buy the summer ones at the end of september when they're desperate and then just leave them in the box till next summer. check ebay, too; they have lots of unused fashiony shoes and things. or, if you value your time and don't want to fuck around, just shell out for the four pairs of ferragamo shoes. you're a lawyer! you need good shoes! if the cost is going to be amortized over even 5 years they will be much cheaper than my "just start buying shoes' suggestion in the long run. (query: will this work to justify expensive shoe purchases to husband x?)
There seem to be a few women here who never wear heels and don't understand why other women kill themselves looking for comfortable shoes that are both professional and trendy. I don't think I've ever gone out with a woman who wore heels more than five times a year.
LizardBreath seems to be the unfortunate exception in that her job actually requires either uncomfortable shoes or incredibly expensive shoes. This is because of archaic standards created centuries ago (as suggested in #23) which have not been updated for an age when "formal dress" for women means shoes to wear to work rather than shoes to wear to the cotillion.
Instead of scouring town for random mules, scour town for Ferragamos on sale.
No. I'm supposed to make it my fucking hobby to check into shoe stores weekly to find out if they might carry Ferragamo flats for less than $400? Possibly that's the only way to find shoes that will make me happy, but I don't think it's reasonable.
is there a good reason why you can't have detachable heels?
This would make someone buckets of money if they could figure out how to do it. High heels have a curved, rigid arch that's needed to make it possible to wear them at all, and which without the heel would put your foot in a very strange position, even harder to walk in than with the heel. But if you had a little transformer shoe whose sole could reconfigure along with the heel, then you'd be rich, rich rich.
You could have Autobot shoes and Decepticon shoes.
MORE THAN MEETS THE FEETS
Here's a question: how much are people willing to spend on shoes, and in what relation to other expenses? I will drop an absolute mint on shoes (and by "an absolute mint" I mean in the $250 range) but I would faint if someone suggested that I buy a $250 pair of pants or a $250 handbag. In fact, my whole clothing budget is pretty much determined by whether or not I need shoes.
94: What I'm saying is, the fashion thing *is* basically a hobby. Most clothes and shoes are junk, and are *intended* to be disposable. If you actually care about looking a particular way and not putting up with shoddy clothes, then about 90% of what's out there isn't even an option. Which, unless you want to embrace the hobby of shopping/seeking out unexpected finds actually makes it easy. You just search for "Ferragamo sale" online (e.g., here: first Google hit), or else you ask around to find out which shops to go to, or you take note, as Alameida says, of when the major dept. stores have their big sales.
The solution is simple: nobody wear any shoes any more. I'm down.
93: I'm starting to feel as though I'm frothing at the mouth here, and I probably am being unreasonable. I just want to keep shrieking that it's insane that professional + reasonably fashionable = painful, that nodding and saying, 'well, of course you can't buy professional looking shoes if you mind your feet bleeding, you have to expect that most of the shoes you see in your average shoe store selling non-athletic shoes will make your feet bleed, wanting your feet not to bleed is a minority, specialized taste' is not a reasonable response.
But I'm a little touchy about shoes. I should duck out of this thread because I'm losing it.
Wearing shoes creates weak featies, which in turn, create weak ankles and calves. Then when you go jogging along, you land on your knobby little heels, and that makes your knees go wobbly, absorbing shock, which is bad for your knees. Then your knees get hurt and you can't go jogging along any more. And who wants that?
No shoes.
Are flats really, seriously not work-appropriate, even in fancy jobs, even in New York?
It's less that flats aren't work-appropriate than that they don't go with some work-appropriate clothes. Like, when I had to wear suits every day, I preferred suits with a skirt over pantsuits and you can't get away with wearing flats with a skirt-suit. You need to wear heels.
My current job is a little more casual (no suits but about one step down) so I wear pants, which means I can get away with flats. I'd wear more skirts (they're comfy) if I could find comfortable shoes to go with them.
The most expensive shoes I own are a pair of ordinary winter boots. They cost me the UK equivalent of around 160 dollars about 6 or 7 years ago. I'm a cheapskate. I don't know any guys who spend a lot of money on shoes -- although I do walk past a traditional men's shop every day in Oxford and admire the 500 dollar handmade brogues.
99: I deeply regret not having bought an absolutely gorgeous pair of ridiculously high and elegant strappy Prada wedges (I know, wedge and elegant are usually incompatible, which is one reason I regret this non-purchase) which was on sale for, I think, $350. But I couldn't justify the price. If I could have afforded it (by which I mean, rationalized to myself that okay, for the next couple months I won't buy anything else I don't need), then I probably would have. I think the most expensive pair of shoes I've ever owned was about $200ish? They were lovely and went with my silk opera dress. Alas, that was pre-PK, and afterwards they didn't fit and I gave them away to someone who didn't take care of them and just tossed them in the closet where they got all fucked up.
That said, I consider $70-130ish reasonable for shoes. I usually buy on sale, though, at the end of the season, b/c for the last few years I really haven't been able to afford that.
Right. I wear a fair number of skirts (because I also have better things to do with my life than take every fucking pair of pants to the fucking tailor because it would kill manufacturers to sell women's pants by inseam length), and while I do wear them with flats, they have to be very formal looking flats or they look really unprofessional.
a traditional men's shop every day in Oxford
Ducker and Son, in the Turl? Now that would be a fit subject for the discussion of shoes.
102: no, no LB, you're actually totally in the right. I'm just embracing the craziness. maybe when we start the unfogged group house we can have a business on the ground floor selling fashionable, comfortable shoes for a reasonable price. alternatively, I know of this place in HK where they make a last shaped precisely like your foot, and will duplicate shoes for you. so, all you have to do is go to hk, and get them to copy your ferragamos! later, you can just email them! and yet, I have a niggling feeling of doubt that perhaps this suggestion is not a reasonable one. I airily brush it aside. think, we could also get great dim sum! and tailor-made clothes!
You know, there's a partner here with a big anti-trust case -- someone's suing the government of China for fixing the price of Vitamin C. Maybe I could plot to get staffed on it, and sent to China so I could shop in Hong Kong with you.
text: have you injured yourself yet?
103: I miss the Peace Corps. Two solid years in flipflops. There was a month in there where a dog stole my flipflops, and the island where I was living didn't have any more for sale, so I had no shoes until I had enough time to take the bus into the capital. A week of that, and I could walk barefoot over razor-sharp broken lava rocks.
Good times.
102: It *is* insane that most shoes aren't all that comfortable. I guess I'm just saying well, that's how it is. The solutions are just accept it and have too many shoes and wear the ones that turn out to be comfortable most of the time, or refuse to buy anything that you don't already *know* is comfortable (which is probably less money in the long run), or make fashion a hobby and learn to enjoy poking around and trying on shoes for fun, or decide that you don't give a crap about being "cute" and stock up on the Naturalizers.
I mean, think of it this way. Guys don't have *nearly* the shoe options women do. As a result, most men's shoes are reasonably comfortable, if boring-looking. Women have more options, which means that we get the hassle that comes with having an abundance of choice: weeding through the bad stuff to find out the good, and basically narrowing down the options available to about the same size subset that the men have.
Come to think of it, the shoe problem makes a good metaphor for the whole health care debate. Sure, if you have time and don't mind making health insurance plans a hobby and can afford to do so, you think the free market and choice are no problem. If you don't want to spend the rest of your life learning all about health care options and sizing, or spending a ton of money on mistakes, then single-payer or some limited range of universal options seem a lot more reasonable.
have we discussed wearing the velcro things and then changing into the cute shoes at work? and then making peons xerox for you? I realize this doesn't address the underlying issues.
112: Now those, those are some awesome shoes.
I find they are on the web, and fwiw, they do ladies' shoes.
LizardBreath, I haven't wanted to say this because it sometimes has made people turn crabby and refer to me as some kind of doctrinaire commie, but this shoe situation is just capitalist patriarchy at play. Of COURSE there aren't comfortable stylish shoes available at reasonable prices! It's just like healthcare, just like pensions, just like a living wage and affordable housing. Lots of people are invested in having things be f****d up and unjust, and sometimes that makes things inconvenient. I feel your pain, both literal and metaphorical, but without drastic social reform we're unlikely to have any really good options. One pays, as it were, to play--if one has to suffer pain and discomfort to hold a high-paying job, then one is more likely to fight like hell to hold onto the priviledges attained once one attains them. And if you're poor and have a crummy job and uncomfortable shoes? Too bad.
That's all awfully depressing to contemplate, so I prefer to think about the next time I can afford a pair of Trippens.
119: Relax and feel at home. We're all about the capitalism-blaming here.
FWIW, I'd suggest that part of the issue in question is that men tend to own a lot fewer pairs of shoes, and thus can actually break them in (both the shoe, and the foot). I currently have two pairs of work/dress shoes--a brown pair and a black pair. Each pair killed me for a few days after I bought them (hint: don't wear . Then the shoes, and my feet adapted. Problem now solved for the next 2 years +.
I suspect the answer to silvana's question why the pads and adjusting shims don't come on the shoes to start with is that these must be individual to the feet, and are also likely to be different left to right.
The shoes in this category stress the feet. When I think of the shoes I've worn or worked with that are for foot-stressing activities, I find a comparable level of care needs to be spent on them. I've been a runner, hiker, climber, cyclist and skater. The shoes I've worn for these activities have needed to be selected with care, and have required breaking-in, and the careful placement of inserts to keep the feet from sliding, which makes blisters. When I haven't gotten it right, the result has been anguish. When you've got it right, everything is sweet, but how to replace, repair and extend these shoes is a big issue once you've felt the difference they make, and what they allow.
Now, nobody has to do these things, they are not the professional and personal requirement good dress shoes are for LB. So they don't address the resentment and lack of patience she has about this stuff. But they do allow me to compare experiences.
That is:
(hint: don't wear brand new leather daess shoes to a trade show where you will be walking and standing all day, if you don't enjoy being crippled with bloody, infected blisters.)
Okay, I actually disagree with 119. There *are* comfortable inexpensive shoes. There just aren't many comfortable, inexpensive shoes that are *also fashionable*. Because fashion, pretty much by definition, is a status game.
Overturning the system might put us all in sneakers. That's fine, if that's what one wants (and if so, then just wear the frumpy shoes now and make a virtue of being a rebel). Keeping the fun that is fashionable shoes means hanging onto one's bourgeois status hangups. So, suck it up.
(Which is why I always try to tell people I'm more conservative than they think I am.)
I haven't, Standpipe, except for some shin splints that went away. And what's more, I went down to even less shoe. I now run in the puma h street, with no socks. Luckily you can put them in the washing machine.
(And of course, on feminist grounds, yes: it sucks that women are expected to play the bourgeois fashion game, and if we don't, we're penalized in ways that men aren't. I'm quite willing to get mad about that.)
What about Ecco shoes? I know people who swear by them, and some of their womens - business shoes look like things a lawyer could easily wear to work, although not super-trendy.
On the larger point, though, it is nuts that women's shoes seem mainly for the birdboned (their feet probably don't hurt in any of these), or for those who don't mind either having their freedom of movement restricted or else having sore feet.
Even athletic shoes are a capitalist conspiracy. Nobody needs all that plastic crap.
Each pair killed me for a few days after I bought them
Chops, I have heard it said that if they hurt when you first get 'em, they don't really fit. Does anyone else have reason to believe this is so?
Even athletic shoes are a capitalist conspiracy
There's actually a good, short, reasonable book about the extent to which this is true.
126: You know, that's the thing here. At work, I'm a bit of a shlumphf, but I'm not trying to be a rebel, fashion-wise. I want to dress in a fashion that is professionally invisible, with as little effort as possible. From the ankles up, I can manage that all right. From the ankles down, my choices seem to be (a) put in a great deal of attention and effort, or a really exorbitant amount of money; (b) be a rebel -- wear shoes that are noticeably unfashionable and for that reason professionally inappropriate; or (c) suffer. What I do is tiptoe along the edge of (b), but I resent the fuck out of it.
birdboned (their feet probably don't hurt in any of these)
Not true. I should be working, so won't google the numbers, but even very tiny women put a lot of pressure on their feet in heels. And if the shoe rubs, it's going to cause a blister, even in a little kid that weighs all of 40 lbs.
re: 125
I suffer a fair bit from shin-splints. I would have thought those low-profile sorts of shoes would have made it worse rather than better.
Although, to be fair, the old-school squash shoes I wear for savate are pretty light and lacking in padding and they seem OK.
Slol, I'd say that's somewhat true, but dependent in part on how you use them out of the gate--see above re trade shows. For having fat ass, swivel-chair spread office job, I do a fair amount of walking getting around the sprawling corporate HQ I work in.
127: Those look plausible. I'll keep an eye out for them.
131: But isn't that more a beef about the standards of professional dress than it is about shoe manufacturers? Women should not be expected to wear heels to work. Period.
I can't read this thread as anything other than alameida and bitchphd saying to Lizardbreath, "Come on, give it a chance, the patriarchy isn't so bad...."
135: Save yourself the hassle of going to shops, LB. Here.
Shut up, Ogged. We're not saying it isn't so bad, we're saying that when it comes to shoes, we freely admit that we're whores.
because it would kill manufacturers to sell women's pants by inseam length
Oh, don't get me started on this topic.
Someone upthread mentioned grunge. The grunge era was a magical, wonderful era of comfort. And when my sweaters got holes in them, I just kept wearing them.
124: See, I don't quite agree. While "fashion" is a bourgeois status game, that doesn't mean that if we were all economically equal we'd all want nothing but Mao suits. Consider, for example, squatter punks. They dress for in-group status, individual-whim-as-mediated-by-group-mores, and to piss off the squares. But I assure you that their status competition is not based around the desire to show off wealth. Or consider (moving along to social democracy) Sweden. Or Germany. There's a much larger culture of comfortable yet various and stylish shoes in those places, and there's much less inequality.
The origin of fashion doesn't determine its end, so to speak--there's of course quite a lot of material on the history of fashion/industry/bourgeois consolidation (And some very interesting stuff on used clothes markets in the 18th and early 19th centuries!) but merely because fashion has a dubious origin doesn't mean that we can't imagine some kind of utopian-yet-shoe-driven future. In fact, we could postulate that a utopian shoe-based-society (er...I can't help it: Shoetopia!) would be more fun because we could all use shoes as amusement and style competition without having to bore ourselves silly hunting for comfortable, reasonably okay shoes that were work-appropriate, since all shoes would be appropriate...(For our stints preparing environmentally-sound porridge, tilling the fields, and making homespun, I suppose, though)
Famous lit crit guy and science fiction writer Samuel Delany describes an extremely fashion-conscious and yet vastly more just society in his early seventies novel Triton.
136: The thing is, for the rest of fashion, there's some degree of oppression in having to pay attention to and buy this year's color or cut, but it sucks up mostly just attention and money. With the shoes, it comes down to pain.
I find it insane and offensive that painful shoes are normal -- that this discussion is "Well, you can mitigate the pain, or you can opt out of fashion, but fashionable shoes are going to hurt." Painful shoes should be limited to fetish-wear, not be a norm.
Those Ecco shoes are totally rank looking.
However, there do seem to be lots of cute-ish round-toed shoes around with small heels that look i) quite professional and ii) comfortable.
141: I dunno. I mean, I don't spend a ton of money on clothes (much less, apparently, than the average woman), but I buy stuff used or on sale or whatever. In other words, I make it a hobby to dress a particular way. That's still scarcity of a type--I have the time to screw around shopping (a lot of your countercultural folks--squatters, punks, whoever) have made basically a similar decision: to substitute time for money. But I think that anything that connotes status "costs" something. If it were widely and easily available, it wouldn't connote status.
Ttam: shin splints are sort of an annoying thing most runners deal with, because the tendons in the lower leg are weak as compared to the rest of the leg, because, among other reasons, we wear shoes with heels. You should try to run on the balls of your feet without pushing off too much, just using your calves to absorb the shock. Also, raise your foot up and down to strengthen the tendons when you're just wasting time on unfogged.
Caveat: I don't know anything. I also advocate running with small animals strapped to your feet.
Women should not be expected to wear heels to work. Period.
What I want to know is, who expects women to wear heels to work? I worked in an investment bank (though not as a banker) for a year and never wore them and it certainly didn't hurt me. What do you think the consequences would be for women who wore flats with skirts to work?
142: It *isn't* pain or non-fashion. Fashionable shoes can be comfortable. It's just that finding the ones that are takes a lot of time that you don't want to have to spend. Basically, it's pain (widely available), non-fashion (slightly less widely available, but not hard to find), or fashion+comfort (requires time and/or money).
LB, you're not crazy at all: this is a real problem.
I'm struck by how many of the commenters have said something to the effect of, 'These kinds of shoes hurt my feet, but I see other women wearing them, so they must just know something I don't.'
There might be certain things to look for (higher vamp on mules) or tricks (gel insert in the heels), but come on, it's not rocket science. Or I mean, it shouldn't be.
I'm back and forth between the U.S. and Europe for my academic research, so in the past few years I've bought almost all my shoes in Europe. There are absurd shoes here, too, but overall the quality and wearability are still better.
And I like low- to mid-height sculptural heels (think 1920s), which I can find here without too much problem. I couldn't imagine finding something like that in the U.S., unless it came into fashion one season, when I'd be able to find nothing but that and then wouldn't want it any more.
re: 145
Yeah, I know about the basic causes of shin splints. My lower leg tendons ought to be fairly strong -- from the kickboxing stuff I do -- but I suppose there could still be an imbalance between calf muscles and shin muscles. I more or less gave up on running as a form of exercise years ago and substituted in walking and cycling as I just couldn't avoid the shin splints.
fashion+comfort (requires time and/or money).
But really, a shitload of time, or an incredible shitload of money.
kickboxing is significantly more awesome than running anyway, Ttam. It could be that you were ramping up too fast on the mileage, and not giving the tendons enough time to recover. Supposedly it takes tendons longer to respond to trauma than muscle tissue, so even though you feel like you could go further, you shouldn't at first.
I think most runners eventually injure themselves, so maybe it isn't the best form of exercise out there.
re: 151
Yeah, but contrary to appearances, kickboxing doesn't really give that much of an aerobic workout -- it's more sudden bursts of extreme exertion (anaerobic style) rather than continued effort.*
I'd like to be able to run more just as a general form of exercise and also because, years ago, I used to enjoy it. I am luckily enough to live near some beautiful woodland so there are nice places for me to run, if I could.
I think you are right re: running and injuries. I'd only like to be able to do 2 or 3 miles once or twice a week, rather than anything serious.
*It rocks for flexibility and coordination, though.
Isn't it time to call "bullshit" of a sort here? I deny that you'll pay a penalty for consistently wearing comfortable shoes. The thinking seems to be "I feel under- or inappropriately dressed." Yeah, ok, but while dressing poorly, being fat, whatever, might affect your career, I just don't believe that wearing comfortable and nice, but not stylish and painful shoes will hurt anyone's career.
141: To digress from the main theme of the thread, I did want to separate status from money/inequality. People seemed to suggest that fashion is neccessarily about modern capitalism and the standards established by the bourgeoisie, and therefore if we had economic equality we would not have fashion. For both historical and radical-political-but-not-boring reasons, I would like to separate these ideas. That is, I don't think that social competition is an artifact of capitalism, much as the specific performance of it is shaped by capitalism.
With my 9WW feet and painful bunions, I am as angry as LB about this situation. But with my still-vibrant childhood excitement over dress-up, I am also as excited as BPhD over a good pair of fancy heels. For stillettos, I'd stick to boots. For extreme comfort, I'd second the ecco and Naturalizer and add Dansko. They have added a bunch of great-looking heels recently. Yes, they are $150 but they last forever (never less than 3 years in my experience and with minor repairs now and then, twice that or more). Harry's on Broadway and 83d is good for practical shoes, as is Tip Top, on 72d between Amsterdam and Columbus. There's another good comfort shoe store across the street and a little north from Paragon sports.
It would sort of make sense if the relative un-necessariness of heels in the U.S. leads to them being more uncomfortable. Maybe it's even a fetish thing: as wearing uncomfortable shoes becomes more and more voluntary, the shoes get more uncomfortable.
Anyway, here in Latin America I regularly see pregnant women walking down the street in stiletto heels. Either the shoes are different or the feet are... I doubt that social pressure leads to near-universal acceptance of bleeding foot sores.
Stretch your calves before workout to prevent shin splints. Once you've got shin splints, ice all the freakin' time and wait 'em out.
these danskos, for instance, are insanely comfortable: http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/8523720/c/56998.html
(sorry, still can't figure out how to make links)
Why is it, then, that women in porn are wearing fucking heels when they're having sex?
Very little in porn has much resemblance to what I find sexually appealing. Brittle peroxide hair. Acrylic finger claws. Hydraulic lift breast implants. Garish makeup. Ridiculous o-faces and inauthentic howling. Honestly, the ubiquity of heels in porn probably lessens their appeal for me.
I'm not saying it doesn't work for some people, but really, I only notice shoes if they're made out of snake or alligator skin or are very brightly colored or make noises or something.
153: A bit. There's more room on the edge of what I called 'being a rebel' than I make it sound like there is. But it is really pretty tricky to find 'nice and comfortable' shoes that aren't not just unfashionable, but conspicuously so.
Anyway, here in Latin America I regularly see pregnant women walking down the street in stiletto heels. Either the shoes are different or the feet are... I doubt that social pressure leads to near-universal acceptance of bleeding foot sores.
I bet you're wrong.
Anyway, here in Latin America I regularly see pregnant women walking down the street in stiletto heels. Either the shoes are different or the feet are... I doubt that social pressure leads to near-universal acceptance of bleeding foot sores.
OTOH, I seem to recall that there are countries in S. America in which, for a certain social class, plastic surgery is ubiquitous and universal in a way it isn't here. So it's possible that the social pressures are significantly greater there.
Social pressure leads to the universal wearing of backless heeled flip-flops a size too small in Thailand. They want their shoes to be all cute and little when they leave them at the door, but when you look, their heels are ALWAYS hanging off the end of the shoe.
It's obviously done for men, and it's obviously all about male sadism. No different than foot binding in China. A woman is more sexy when she is in pain.
Some time ago, The Manolo had a pair of links on his blog, one of which went to some fashionable dude's sketches for shoe designs (or maybe actual shoes), and the other of which went to photos of deformed by binding feet. They looked almost exactly alike! Too bad I can't find it (I assume, not having looked) again.
It isn't the height of the heels, as long as the heel is thick.
So to speak.
161: Near-universal acceptance of heavy callouses, I'd consider more likely. But I also think that in a society where women 'need' to wear heels more, there will be more comfortable heels available (echoing Blume's point above).
Sure, the blisters heal, and protective scar tissue forms. But I'd bet a fair amount that if you asked one of those women "Do you own shoes that make your feet bleed? Do you wear them anyway?" you'd get two yeses from a big chunk of the population.
141: the thing is that bphd only cares about bourgeois money=status fashion, and recognizes no other kind, because she aspires to bourgeois success (though doesn't want to admit it). There are plenty of comfortable, inexpensive shoes that are also fashionable, so long as one's got the right sort of milieu. Note the shift to a metaphorical "cost"—the effort to keep up with your group could be as much as it is—in 144.
Standpipe, Transformers: More than Meets the Feets, is awesome.
As a child I had huge problems buying dress shoes, because my feet were very narrow. They have since spread to a medium. I thought that 7 1/2 was not tiny, but I think that everyone's feet have just gotten bigger so that 8 1/2 is closer to standard.
It is not true that there aren't men who have problems with shoe sizing. I think that orthotics might have helped my Dad, because for many years he hobbled around in pain in dress shoes. He always had to buy New Balance running shoes, that he got at an outlet, because they come in Wide. He wore penn loafers a lot, and he has some very nice dress shoes that he got custom-made. My grandfather (Mom's Dad) used to buy similar shoes from Cambridge, England at a shop he discovered while there on a fellowship. My Dad found a much cheaper place. His dress shoes are wing tips in black and brown (he has two of each) which he cares for really well. He polishes them and puts them in shoe trees, and he's had them resoled.
He always had to buy New Balance running shoes, that he got at an outlet, because they come in Wide
Me too! They are annoyingly expensive, too. Any other ideas for wide shoes which will be comfortable for a mix of uses like walking around, playing in the park, riding my bike, working out if I ever do that again?
Just the thread to read on the morning I saw my ankle surgeon. [sigh] I have a closetful of heels I'll never wear again, many of which were very comfortable, even the 3" ones. I am now relegated to flats, which is OK, because I've been a fan of ballet flats for years, tho' I suspect the doctor would prefer I wear something like these for the ankle support.
I second Dr B on Aerosoles. There are cute Ecco shoes around here - much nicer than the ones they show on their website - and they are beyond comfortable [I am wearing Eccos as we type.] An obvious option, if there is pressure to wear heels at work - is to keep a pair or two in a desk drawer and walk to work in flats. I did that for years before I discovered Aerosoles.
It's worth noting that a good shoe repair shop can change the heel height on many shoes - I've had it done on a couple of pairs, with great success - so if a shoe is otherwise comfortable, it can be altered to "reasonable to walk in".
FWIW, I could never wear mules - like LB, I was in agony in a short time. My sister swears by them. Go figure.
It's also been my experience that the high-end shops have really good dump sales - after all, none of their regular customers want shoes that were 5 minutes ago. I used to haunt the Last Days sales at Neiman Marcus, where it was often easy to score a pair of $300 shoes for $50.
The only good thing about shredding my Achilles tendon and having to drastically change my footwear is that I get to go buy more shoes. I'm donating the heels/other shoes I can no longer wear to a battered women's group that provides business attire for women who are trying to get jobs.
I love that the men are talking about Deadwood while the women are talking about shoes. Next up: boys and periods.
Oh, one more brand of comfortable yet decent looking shoe: Mephisto. Wait, two more: Taryn Rose.
re: Wide feet: The Kid used to wear EEEEs. Then his feet got longer, but not wider, and he's down to EEE. He still keeps New Balance in business, but his work shoes are Birkenstocks. [professional clogs - they have anti-skid soles, important in a kitchen.]
Woohoo, Taryn Rose, I've heard of those!
My father-in-law, at 6'8", never owned a pair of shoes that fit until the mid-eighties--he simply had to crunch his feet into the largest shoes he could find. Then the surrounding population started growing to catch up with him, and in the mid-eighties he started to find larger shoe sizes--once they were available, in his early fifities, his feet grew two sizes.
My father, was a Size 6 EEE or EEEE. His feet were practically square. In Pre-WWW, small-town South Dakota, he had to become a distributor for a line of specialty shoes available only through mail order to find shoes that fit.
Oh yeah, I forgot they make men's shoes too. They are way more expensive than Mephisto, but they are pretty. You should have bought them, ogged.
You should have bought them, ogged.
Ah, but given that they're men's shoes, I bet they're still available, and I could buy them any old time.
175: Yeah, being physically unusual doesn't help. Part of what makes me so cranky about this stuff is that my options are further circumscribed by having weird feet. They're not all that big, but they're quite wide (although not really unusual in that regard), and have freakishly high insteps -- my foot is much, much thicker vertically than most people's.
This shuts out a lot of shoe options, for reasons that aren't particularly the designers' fault, but it makes me ever crankier about the remaining options I have.
177: Now you're just taunting us.
I have 2 recommendations: moleskin and Arche.
Moleskin is to protect your skin where the shoe rubs it and creates blisters. Each summer shoe seems to have at least one pressure point and now we're not allowed to protect our feet with pantyhose. Get the cheaper Duane Reade brand rather than the Scholl's, which is too thick. You can either stick it directly onto a (popped) blister in an emergency, or put it on in advance if you can tell where the problem is going to be.
Arche is the closets thing to "looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker" as I've found. They are more casual than what you posted, but you can wear them with a dress, and I can easily walk all day in them (87th to 42nd and back today)—and without moleskin! The down side? They're about $200. Go try some on: the Madison location is closed for renovation, but I think 57th between 6th and 7th is open. They are European sizes but they seem to run small. Then watch Ebay for something new in your size. It's worth the effort.
Also, I admit that in my experience, more expensive fabulous shoes are more comfortable. Go to the shoe floor at Barney's with some peds or thin socks and try on the sale shoes. Pay attention to what size you wear in Blahnik and Choo and Louboutin, and also look for the less known names. I have good luck with Michel Perry. Then look on Ebay for a new or barely used shoe in your size. It doesn't solve the pressure point problem, but it does help with high heel pain/fatigue.
Each summer shoe seems to have at least one pressure point and now we're not allowed to protect our feet with pantyhose.
You're not?
Why has nobody suggested wearing pantyhose to reduce the blister problems, anyway?
Those look excellent. These, particularly:
are what I was looking for all summer and couldn't find -- wide-strapped sandals.
181: You put on a pair of pantyhose on a hot day and tell me. If normal women's fashion included socks with skirts, that'd solve a lot of problems.
Oh, drat, the picture in 182 isn't working. It was supposed to be a pair of Arche sandals.
If normal women's fashion included socks with skirts
Ah, there's your problem -- you should be following fashions for peculiar women.
alameida has put up a post at her other group blog that I want to be an Unfogged thread. (Though the comments over there are going pretty well, better than I'm used to at that site -- somebody has put up an Emerson-esque complaint that all the hot guys are going for the ducks instead of keeping with their own species.)
Yeah, I have the "freakishly high instep" problem as well. An orthopedist once referred to them as "caverns." Try to find a pair of heels with any appreciable arch support, I dare ya. They don't exist.
And because my plantar fasciitis (and my knee problem) tends to flare up if I don't wear the orthodic insoles, I can't ever wear pretty, strappy sandals. My shoes have to be fully enclosed to hold in the orthodic, so I end up wearing very matronly craptastic shoes. Mostly flats.
I own a few heels, circa 1989, bought at thrift stores, which clutter my closet, never worn. They are uniformly ugly anyway. I don't know what will happen if I ever *need* dress shoes. Luckily, my office is pretty informal.
Damnitall! I want to be a whore for the patriarchy, and my rebellious body won't let me.
I think that 186 should be edited to read, "Person Real name W has put up a post on [Insert name of Blog].
I don't know about the pantyhose/heat issue. I wore them growing up in Houston when they were in fashion and didn't think about the heat issue. Furthermore, we're not really suppsed to wear pantyhose in winter either, although tights are OK. They're just not in fashion now and haven't been since, well, since a pedicure salon popped up on every block.
There are short peds available to protect the foot but not show, and toe-only peds to maintain the bare foot look with the heel exposed. The shoes pictured in the post would slide right off with any pantyhose and wouldn't allow for even the toe-only peds.
188: No, it's cool. It's not supposed to be difficult to identify the rosy-toed Alameida if you're a blog-reader; it's just supposed to be impossible to google her if you're a RL acquaintance who isn't bloggy.
Well, it's pretty easy to do that anyway. I've just thought that the Clown Kid was a little bit too fast and loose.
169: I also can only buy New Balance shoes. When your foot is a 7.5EE, nothing else works. I used to wear the "standard mathematician's uniform" (white 620), but at some point decided I wanted to be *slightly* more stylish and have switched to various blue 574 classics. But since those are limited edition, and since I don't seem to like New Balance's other styles, I'm not sure what I'm going to do in another year or two. On top of that, I'm reaching an age where I ought to have *something* other than sneakers to wear, and I don't think that I can find anything that fits at all. Any suggestions?
Rockport makes good work shoes and (I think) dress shoes that come in widths. They are a little expensive but not outlandish -- in New Balance territory.
159 (and all the other posts on men's desires and women's shoes): There's a simple misunderstanding going on here. Certainly some men care about women wearing "sexy" unfomfortable shoes. Such as men from L.A., men who buy said mainstream porn, many gay men, and probably several other classes I'm forgetting. However, those groups of men tend to have a relatively small intersection with the men of Unfogged and their friends. I only pay attention to women's shoes to the extent that I've realized that women who wear comfortable shoes is a decent proxy for being the sort of woman I might want to date and who might want to date me.
the men of Unfogged and their friends
Coming soon to a centerfold near you!
"friends" s/b "sidekicks".
(I never did the Kenosha Kid.)
LB, I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of shoe stores. The goal of a shoe store is to appeal to the majority of shoppers, not to special cases. For men, that means that if you're not a standard size, then in all likelihood any given store has 0 shoes that fit you. For women, this means that if you don't want painful shoes there probably won't be any shoes that fit you. Also, it means that they're designed for women who like to shop for shoes, not for women who need a pair of shoes.
This is why God invented the internet. All you need to do is locate *one pair* of shoes in the style that you're looking for that fit you and which you like. That sucks and may take a while. But once you've done that, you can keep buying them over and over on the internet. If women's fashion moves too quickly for that, then just buy several pairs at once, and not worry about it for a decade.
193: Thanks, I'll check them out.
well. comfortable shoes =! good for your feet necessarily. all the times i have ruined my feet to the point of considering a doctor's visit, it has been with flip-flops.
but more to the point: LB, why do heels if you don't want to? you can totally wear mensweary pointed shoes like this with a skirt - and you can find versions with or without backs:
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/17350677/c/2024.html
(sorry for not linking neatly)
i often prefer the mensweary thing because it looks more womanly and less girly/fluttery. and it's better for your foot.
in general, pointiness in flats makes up a lot for lack of heel -- both in terms of formality & in making your leg look good.
Can't/won't do pointy. The widest point of my foot, by a long shot, is the ball, and the toes are just as wide. I couldn't possibly wear the linked shoes.
I don't understand the equation of "flip-flops" with "comfortable shoes" -- they seem pretty uncomfortable to me if you are doing any significant walking. The almost-bare-feet thing is comfortable but not really as comfortable as bare feet, which are better for walking around in. If I'm wearing something on my feet I want it to stay in fairly close contact with my soles throughout the step.
I agree with 202. Flip-flops are far less comfortable and far less practical than sneakers, as far as I'm concerned. (at least the kind of sneakers you don't have to lace up) The only time I've ever worn flip-flops is either in communal showers or on the beach, i.e. places where I don't want to actually touch the ground with my feet, but can't wear sneakers because they would get wet.
Rockports are alleged to be the most comfortable shoes evar but I've never found them to live up to that billing. They're good shoes, to be sure, but not necessarily worth the price (ime). I don't have to worry about widths, though.
I also agree with 202 and 203. I don't see how people can walk long distances in flip-flops.
They're getting identified as comfortable because they're less awful than most women's sandals, not because they don't suck.
WRT expense of Rockports, one way to justify it is that they are very durable indeed. I had a pair of work shoes from them that I bought in 1992 that I threw out last year, having re-soled them twice in the intervening period. Though admittedly they were sub-optimal for the last three years or so of their time with me.
(This is what bugs me so much about the expense of New Balances, is they never seem to hold up more than about a year or 18 months.)
The Rockports I've had have never lasted very long. But then, few shoes have; I walk a lot, and that kind of walking, particularly here, is hell on shoes.
For walking shoes, I love Timberlands. I've got a pair that I wear to work with pants, hoping that no-one's looking at my feet.
I can't possibly read all 200 comments so my comments may be redundant, but LizardBreath, do you have to wear skirts? With pants you can just wear ankle boots or nice oxfords. My favorite shoes right now are Clarks loafers -- I can walk for miles, and they're quite professional loooking. For skirts, Campers are kinda cute.
I have a really nice suede pair of Hush Puppies sandals that aren't at all ugly and have lasted over six years, which is truly remarkable for sandals.
201: you're the best judge... but with good quality pointy shoes, your toes shouldn't be in the pointy part. that part is air. your toes just occupy the shoe as far up as they would naturally go, normal width, no squishing.
oh, and flip-flops are amazingly comfortable for me(esp. the leather kind, not shower shoes). that's why it's so tempting to walk long distances in them (and hurt the feet). except no more - i recently had to switch to silver birkenstock flip-flops because of a drunken soccer injury.
once you get over the brief period of blisters ON THE SOLES OF YOUR FEET from birkenstocks, they heal hurt feet nicely.
I have a pair of Timberland boat shoes that I like a lot despite inadequate arch support. I recently decided that the solution to the problem of my shoes wearing out so fast was to have more than one pair at a time, so I bought a pair of these, which are awesomely comfortable.
Dominedtrix made a comment above that got me thinking. Although my brother is much older than I am, and has very different views, I see my resemblance to him more and more as I look in the mirror these days. I've begun to wonder about the clues to my own physical and social adjustments that I can get by studying him.
So let me ask you, LB: Does Dr. Oops have shoe issues similar to yours? If not, how do you account for the differences?
I bought both pairs of shoes mentioned in 214 here, of course.
I had a pair of Italian-made soft leather hiking boots that were the most comfortable walking shoes ever. Great ankle and instep support, great cushioning and completely water-proof. Also, they weren't very 'hiking boot' in appearance so looked good with jeans. I bought them in a sale for about 1/3 of their original price.
Unfortunately, after about 4 years of near constant wear, they finally fell apart a few months ago.
Lizardbreath - far too many comments to read through, so sorry if I'm repeating things.
Cute shoes.
Not for walking though. Walking shoes should keep your feet in place without sliding around. > Mules are not particularly good shoes for walking if you have sensitive feet becase your feet can slide around.
Do not despair, however - it *is* possible to combine cute with practical! Difficult - but possible. It took me four years to find two pairs that fit the bill. One is a low heel sandal that, for want of a better description or a picture, looks like your mules but with an ankle strap. The strap doesn't hurt, shoes stay in place, heels low, looks cute. The other one is even better. Pumps (do you use this word? kinda like ballet shoes: flat and cutesy) are all the craze now in the UK, don't know about the states. Most of them look way twee, with their little bows and overly round toes - no thanks. But I found a pair without the bow, in a more classical shape, that is un-be-lievably comfortable AND looks good.
All this from a fellow sufferer of extremely sensitive feet...
Well, I guess I can provide a practical shoe tip after all: get several pairs and "rest" the shoes a day or two between wearings. They hold up much better this way. For the shoe-impaired, also: if your shoes get really, really soaked through, let them dry out for at least two days at room temperature.
(Ah! At last shoes and Shanghai merge into one anecdote--when I lived in Shanghai, we of course did not have heat, since there was by government policy no heating of buildings south of the Yangtze. Like a stupid, I had taken only a pair of Fleet Farm ankle boots and a pair of fiendishly uncomfortable clunky post-grunge oxfords, which I never wore. It gets cold and rainy in Shanghai, and of course when it's cold and rainy and you have no heat, things that are damp generally never quite dry. So my boots never quite dried and one day I wondered what the weird fluffy stuff on my socks was and discovered that the toes of the boots had grown great cobwebs of some kind of mold or fungus inside. Now I have giant feet for a woman, size 10 (and I'd like to point out that tiny feet look odd to me--my aesthetic is definitely based on stylization and involves having large, clunky feet) and in all of Shanghai there were no shoes big enough to contain my feet except at the foreigner store, where I paid 1500 yuan for a pair of Clarks back before they were widely distributed and made with cardboard toe boxes. I wanted to sink into the earth because I was handing over about twice the monthly salary of the salesguy.)
So let me ask you, LB: Does Dr. Oops have shoe issues similar to yours? If not, how do you account for the differences?
Different. Her feet are huge (I've forgotten the size, but it never used to be available in anything even remotely feminine when she was a teen. As people have gotten bigger, it's now often the top end of the normal size range) but less weird than mine -- she hasn't got the instep thing. And she's femmier than I am: much more clothes/makeup/esthetics generally skilled than me. (Also, of course, butcher than I am on the car-fixing/construction working/fucking the shit out of bears axis. This makes comparisons confusing.)
So she's probably had much more lifetime trouble than I have buying shoes, but resents it all less.
I prefer the nearly-barefoot kinds of shoes (saltwater sandals, akido sneakers, ballet flats, combat boots), but I have a number of heels. The most successful ones have been the more expensive ones that enclose my feet entirely; I like t-straps, which harness my feet even more. One two-inch t-strap heel I've had since 10th grade, and I can still walk a couple of miles in it, no problem. Another t-strap heel is about three and a half inches. I can walk okay, dance for maybe an hour, but my feet will hurt the next day, and I never wear them unless I'm expecting a high-heel-specific kind of workout.
Two things about your answer resonate with me.
When we take a dislike to something, we can't help ourselves, it shows. I reacted badly to certain styles of legal reasoning in law school, and to the preparation for exams. I consequently couldn't do as well as my knowledge and aptitude would have suggested, even though I was never close to failing or anything. Later on I relaxed and made a game of it, but later is too late in law school. This baffled teachers, and in fact I'm a good legal reasoner and reader of cases. Which leads to:
The second is that fitting ourselves into expectations, of ourselves and others, can be frustrating. I can see how someone could be both femmer and butcher, but it is difficult to explain that sort of thing, sometimes even to ourselves. Why can't we? Why didn't we? Who are we?
Isn't it time to call "bullshit" of a sort here? I deny that you'll pay a penalty for consistently wearing comfortable shoes. The thinking seems to be "I feel under- or inappropriately dressed." Yeah, ok, but while dressing poorly, being fat, whatever, might affect your career, I just don't believe that wearing comfortable and nice, but not stylish and painful shoes will hurt anyone's career.
This is largely true, I think. Wearing Naturalizers won't hurt your career. But caveats: I'm pretty sure it's true that dressing "sharp" and being conventionally attractive will *help* your career--at least, it will get you noticed much more easily.
The problem is twofold: first, it's still helpful for women at work to be both competent and reasonably conventionally feminine. Which of course you can achieve with nice suits and dull shoes; shoes are really a synechdoche for the whole problem of balancing being "feminine" with being "professional." That's the practical issue, which may be more or less important in a particular job or field than one thinks.
Second, I really think that most women who are successful in conventional ways are really fairly conservative (including me)--after all, if we weren't basically pretty good girls, we wouldn't be bothering with being conventionally successful. And it really is psychologically difficult, I think, to buck conventional definitions of femininity day in and day out. It sucks, frankly, to feel unattractive. So if you're bucking convention, you're likely to end up feeling either kind of beat down and frumpy, or else kind of chip-on-shoulderish and hostile (bitchy). Neither of which is a real winner at work.
In other words, for all my "just buy the damn shoes" advice, it really is a little more of a serious issue than saying "let's be honest: you're not going to be harmed by wearing boring shoes."
And it really is psychologically difficult, I think, to buck conventional definitions of femininity day in and day out. It sucks, frankly, to feel unattractive. So if you're bucking convention, you're likely to end up feeling either kind of beat down and frumpy, or else kind of chip-on-shoulderish and hostile (bitchy). Neither of which is a real winner at work.
Precisely. Thank you for putting it so well.
Anna - pumps = court shoes over here. We just call the ballet flat thingies ballet flats. And yes, they're fashionable here again. [counting] I have four pair of Sam & Libbys, one Kenneth Cole, one Nordstrom and one Clarks and I lust desperately after Taryn Rose and French Sole.
I have heard the problem described as a lack of neutrality. There is no neutral position: if you're not wearing make-up, not wearing femmy shoes, that's not a neutral thing. That is, a b says, bucking convention. But of course wearing make-up and femmy shoes is not neutral either, it's a conscious act, active, and therefore not neutral.
Yeah, that's why I limited the point to shoes. Not only does feeling unattractive suck, but it can actually harm your career, if I'm remembering the studies correctly. My point was that, when it comes to shoes, good enough really is good enough, both because you can look smashing even without spectacular shoes, and because whatever hit your attractiveness or self-esteem takes from not wearing fab shoes is insignificant compared to the hassle and physical pain people have described here.
good enough really is good enough, both because you can look smashing even without spectacular shoes, and because whatever hit your attractiveness or self-esteem takes from not wearing fab shoes is insignificant compared to the hassle and physical pain people have described here.
This ought to be true but I'm not sure it always is; in some situations it will be noticed, and you'll not be able to stop thinking about it yourself.
in some situations it will be noticed
There are always people who will notice every little thing, so yes, but so what? That's a far cry from bucking conventional definitions of femininity day in and day out.
pumps = court shoes over here
I just had a vision of DEditrix playing tennis in heels. And subsequently, of a song in the manner of Steely Dan, entitled "Tennis in Pumps".
That's a far cry from bucking conventional definitions of femininity day in and day out.
Well, it is and it isn't. Because any one thing, in and of itself, is a far cry. Blah shoes? No big deal, just wear nice suits. Breasts too large or too small? No big deal, just have the suits altered. Don't want to pay for dry cleaning on silk blouses? No big deal, just buy cotton mens'-style shirts. Don't wanna learn how to do makeup? No big deal, don't wear it. Hair "style" a pain in the butt? Don't have one.
But then at that point, you *are* bucking conventional definitions of femininity, while all you're actually doing is no more than what men do. (Though I suppose men also have to have suits altered to really look right. Though you guys don't have the bra problem, which is pretty equivalent to the shoe thing.) I mean, we all know that being femme costs more than not being femme. But the costs of not being femme in certain areas really can be ridiculously disproportionate.
I nominate the three most fraught areas as shoes, bras, and hair. Not wearing makeup is actually becoming okay. Finding decent off-the-rack clothes isn't too hard. Short fingernails are okay. But the feet, tits, and hair are still a big deal.
I would imagine it depends on the office, ogged, but I can imagine plenty of situations in which frumpy shoes are not good enough. like you're making a big statement or something. some shoes would obviously be too casual, and you may think you've sidled just past that line into acceptable while your boss is thinking, doesn't she care enough about this to at least dress appropriately? neutrally professional women's shoes genuinely tend towards the painful.
I'll take the chickies' word for it. I thought shoes would be the one place where you could start rolling back some of the ridiculous demands made on women regarding their appearance...
234 shouldn't be taken to mean that you all shouldn't lose a little weight.
Did you miss the memo? "Plate-cleaners" are sexy now!
I would imagine it depends on the office, ogged, but I can imagine plenty of situations in which frumpy shoes are not good enough. like you're making a big statement or something.
Color me suspicious, particularly as regards law firms. I had a couple of very clothes conscious female friends who worked as paralegals for a while, and they would regularly send each other into gales of laughter about how poorly lawyers dressed and how much money they misspent in doing so. This was in DC, so perhaps it's different in NYC. But I bet you could get away with more than you think.
Though I suppose men also have to have suits altered to really look right. Though you guys don't have the bra problem, which is pretty equivalent to the shoe thing.
The only thing I can think of is the tie. Also, for scientists:
Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people. (from)
I sort of agree with B's analysis in 232, even though I'm trend femmy on the submitting-to-patriarchy scale.
I'll often get dressed, look at my shoe options, get frustrated with the idea of wearing heels, and then put on a little makeup or change my shirt. There's some balance between defying the Man and looking good to the Man that I have to true in my head before leaving the house. Comfortable shoes is usually the defying-the-Man entry; I equalize it with neat hair or pressed slacks. In the other direction, though, sometimes I'll start from the idea that I want to wear heels, and then the defying-the-Man entry on the balance has to come from somewhere.
238: Ties? Dude, one size fits all. And while you're expected to wear them, people won't stare at you if you don't.
(Note: ime, all of this femme nonsense is way less of a deal in some parts of the country like oh, say, the Pac NW.)
I was thinking of style, and responses thereto, but of course this thread is about comfort so it's out of place.
Well, if not ties, then what about pants?
People will stare at you if you're a guy and not wearing them.
And, they are similarly oppressive.
243: Exactly! And we don't even have the option of moderating our knuckling under, as JM discusses doing. Pants are either on or off.
On that note, I'm going to take off my pants and get into bed. Goodnight.
I disagree on ties. There are rare times when a guy can't pull off no-tie. And in those times that there are such examples, it is not a 1:1 comparison of ties to shoes or hair or general femme appropriateness. I thought "girls have a higher standard than guys, and that sucks" was one of the undercurrents in this discussion, no?
people tend to stare at me, whether I wear a tie, pants or both tie and pants. It's my burden.
238: Ties? Dude, one size fits all.
Unless you want to look like you're trying, and failing, to imitate Bogart, this is not true. (Though I don't know if you can actually find a short wide tie anymore, which is obviously your point.)
ANYWAY, I got tons of blisters last month until I figured out the cause but you know what? I kind of like blisters, because I like popping them. Mmm, welling pus and anonymous other fluids. I might, however, be a freak in this regard.
Yeah, getting the right length and width of tie isn't that easy.
You need the right size of knot at the neck, and the main 'body' of the tie to hang to the right place at the front. I'd imagine really short guys or really tall guys must find it quite hard, or just rock that '4 inches of shirt between the base of my tie and my trousers' look.
249: How are you getting blisters from a necktie?
Cheap silk.
Plus autoerotic asphyxiation just ain't what it used to be.
239 -- IMO, The Man is a woman. I don't mean the woman who helpfully (and rhetorically) asks me, 'You're not really wearing that to work, right?' from time to time. The only people whose fashion sensibilities I genuinely care about are jurors, and the only jurors with fashion sensibilities strong enough to matter are women. They have plenty of time to watch me at bench conferences (where all sound is muted) and quietly sitting there at the counsel table while someone else is up to bat. I imagine them composing amused emails.
If the staff is sending amused emails about what I wear to the office, it's a sign that we're not giving them enough work to do. On the other hand, defying The Man in this way is probably good for morale, and so I'm doing the enterprise a favor when I wear something noteworthy in its inappropriateness.
IMO, The Man is a woman. I don't mean the woman who helpfully (and rhetorically) asks me, 'You're not really wearing that to work, right?' from time to time. The only people whose fashion sensibilities I genuinely care about are jurors, and the only jurors with fashion sensibilities strong enough to matter are women.
I'd like to argue with this. IMO, women are much more consciously sensitive to fine gradations in fashion, and are much more likely to bring it up (see SCMT's paralegal friends (who were laughing at female attorneys for thinking they could buy their way out of conscious intellectual attention to fashion. It's very hard to substitute money for knowledge and attention; a woman can't, like a man can, dress well simply by buying reasonably expensive clothes at a normal store.)).
But women's reactions are the canary in the coal mine -- I worry about my shoes not because I mind the paralegals thinking I'm comically frumpy (they do, and it's a role I'm comfortable with -- if I were a man I'd be rocking the 'absent-minded professor' look as hard as I could) but because there's some point at which the male partner down the hall is going to notice that I look inappropriate, whether consciously or not. (As a litigation associate, my boss is wildly disproportionately likely to be a man). Like Alameida says:
some shoes would obviously be too casual, and you may think you've sidled just past that line into acceptable while your boss is thinking, doesn't she care enough about this to at least dress appropriately?
That's the line that makes this stressful. I've spent this summer, which is business casual here, in suede Tevas that attach with Velcro. I know the other women in the office think I'm a frump, and that's fine. I don't know that the partners notice, or hold it against me -- I think they probably don't or I'd be sucking it up and accepting the blisters. But I know I'm close to the line on appropriateness, and I worry about it some. I've got the choice between playing it safe, with unquestionably appropriate shoes, and being in pain, or being a little edgy all the time about whether I'm damagingly frumpy.
There's nothing particular for individual men to do other than maintain and cultivate your studied indifference to women's shoes, but it's misleading to say that just because women are more attentive to and more restrictive about fashion standards than men are, that men aren't the audience for fashion at all.
When I was on jury duty I was keyed in to the appearance and dress of the male defense attorney, not so much that of the female prosecuting attorney, I can't really remember what she looked like or how she dressed. I think that was probably because the prosecutor projected (independently of her appearance) an air of confident competence -- the defense attorney did not seem to have his shit together so I noticed the superficial stuff about his looks and bearing more.
who were laughing at female attorneys for thinking they could buy their way out of conscious intellectual attention to fashion. It's very hard to substitute money for knowledge and attention; a woman can't, like a man can, dress well simply by buying reasonably expensive clothes at a normal store.
Clarification: my friends were laughing at male attorneys, primarily. At least, the only examples I remember (having to do with patterned shirts and color choices, IIRC; there might also have been one complaint about collar styles) had to do with male lawyers' choices. I don't doubt that they were bitchy about women, too; I just wouldn't have cared, as such barbs couldn't have guided my clothes usage at all.
my uncle is a partner at cadwalader and he dresses fiiine. custom savile-row suits and handmade shoes...he has this incredible dresser full of dry-cleaned shirts carefully arranged on cardboard and wrapped in tissue, row unpon receding subtle row. cedar shoe trees. a drawer of twenty pairs of apparently new dress socks. I remember during the waning years of the dot-com mania there was a press for "casual dress" and he was disgusted, rightly so IMO. I told him that if I was spending that kind of money on lawyers I didn't want some asshole showing up in khakis and he should ignore it till it blew over. 10 months later he was rocking the chalk stripe once more, just like wickersham and taft would have wanted him to.
the other thing he can do which is so great and NYC is that when he's on the subway he can instantly shake the NYT into these 1/8 folds and read without getting in people's way. I could never manage it.
257: My wife's uncle can quickly tear a column out for saving with great precision apparently freehand. We're going to lose a whole range of print-culture skills, as surely as handwriting, in many cases without knowing they ever existed.
Get old. It's great - nobody gives a shit what you wear.
I only have a few blouses that fit me well, because I think that it's safer for me to go with dressy knit tops, because they have a little bit of give. I have a very nice Christian Dior one that I got from a thrift shop. I do find that French clothes fit me much better than American ones do. Also Ferragamo shoes are pretty amazing. I had a beautiful pair that I got for about $20 ten years ago at Filene's basement.
Those knit types of things seem to be more acceptable in business/casual plus environments like universities. e.g., Ha/rv/ard is a business casual environment, but upper-level administrators who are men are going to wear a suit or a tie with a jacket.
I've noticed that there is somewhat more variation in women's dress than in men's. Men just wear fancier, more expensive suits as tehy get promoted. I used to watch Wall Street Week as a kid (Don't laugh!) with my family. I noticed that a lot of the women who were very Senior people weren't always wearing traditional suits or dark colors. They weren't wearing a ladies-who-lunch outfits, but they had consdierable freedom. Young women who are management consultants or Demcoratic wonks all seem to wear similar clothes. The management consultants may dress differently from the political types, but all the women of a certain age basically look the same and fairly conservative.
Abby Joseph Cohen is quite conservatively dressed, but she can go for a little bit more of an arty look. By that all I mean is that she doesn't have to wear a dark blue or, what is even more common, a black suit with a white shirt. She can wear the amber bead necklaces.
I have noticed that the women Republican political types in DC dress in amuch more girly (is femmy really the right word here?) way than do the Democrats. I wouldn't say that either was unprofessional though.
instantly shake the NYT into these 1/8 folds
I had that down for a little while when I was commuting to Wall St. It takes practice, though, and I couldn't do it today.
LB, I don't mean to oppress you, but I do think that there are sure to be shoes at least almost as comfortable as your suede Tevas that attach with velcro without being, well, suede Tevas that attach with velcro. For between $100-200 you should be able to pick up some flat, wide-strapped, soft-leather Italian sandals that fit well, are comfortable, and look sharp.
232 is spot-on. I sometimes wish that we could change the areas of fraughtness. For example, I don't mind wearing makeup. I even like it, although that may be related to the fact that I don't have to wear it. But the shoes, man, the shoes kill me. I feel like you can dispense with some things in "professional" wear, but there's always this sense that you have to compensate. When I was interviewing last year, I felt pretty self-conscious about my nose piercing and slightly funky-colored hair, so I went ultra-conservative with my suits, the rest of my jewelry and tried very hard in re: makeup and hair to look "sleek." God, the agony me and my friends went through with regard to our appearances during the two weeks of interviews last year should never have to be endured by anyone. It wouldn't have been so bad if we didn't have dress "guidelines" emailed to us by the career services office, including implorations to wear pantyhose with skirt suits, a recommendation I summarily ignored, because fuck that, it's August in Chicago and I am Just. Not. Doing That.
I'd like to, but this gets back to the time investment. I can't find shoes like that by looking in the shoe stores around my office on my lunch hour, or by going to a couple of big department stores and going to their shoe departments (I've done both of those. No joy). I have to prowl the city in the hopes of finding the anomalous shoe store that might carry such a freakish thing as a professionally appropriate and reasonably fashionable sandal that isn't painful.
I'm sure it exists if I looked hard enough: what I'm whining about is that I don't want my shoe preferences (non-painful) to be freakish or hard to find. I don't want shoe-shopping to be a hobby.
JM, what I take away from this discussion is that LB knows this perfectly well, but hates it and can't help kicking at the traces. I don't have the same issues but I'm very sympathetic with having issues. Like Bartleby, she would prefer not to.
264: No. What I hate is the time committment. I can't decide to go out and buy the sandals Jack describes on my lunch hour today. I've been trying. I've been going to shoe stores. If I want to buy painful shoes, I can do it at will, but I can't do the same with comfortable shoes. (And painful/comfortable is not about my personally idiosyncratic feet. I'm talking about more painful for anyone shoes versus more comfortable for anyone. It may bother other people less, but no one thinks a mule is honestly more comfortable than a secure sandal.)
To buy the sandals Jack describes, I have to make shopping for them a regular hobby. I have to scour many, many different stores; research possible brands from friends (which, I got some useful tips on this thread); I have to spend a whole lot of time and attention on finding such a freakish thing as a professionally appropriate shoe that I can comfortably walk in. That's stupid.
The whole point of this post, in fact, was that the pictured sandals were what I could find, in the stores I was going into in the time I was willing to devote, as the most practical sandal type shoes available. That's maybe six hours, total, of shopping over the summer; maybe twenty stores -- I'd walk in whenever I passed a shoe store, try on their most reasonable sandals, realize they hurt, and move on. These didn't hurt when I put them on in the store.
I probably should know more about shoes; should have learned more about how to buy the kind of shoes I want; they're probably out there if I just knew where to find them, or were willing to spend more time researching them. I resent that I can't have professional looking, non-painful shoes without becoming a freaking expert.
That's stupid.
This, absolutely.
I've been wearing my saltwater sandals every day since about May, btw. I doubt they count as professionally appropriate for a lawyer, though, but surely somebody makes a slightly more adult version of the same idea.
I've been looking for those. They'd be a step up from my Teva's, and might come off as ironically fashionable. In any case, I'm sure they'd slide by most men as unobjectionable.
I just have this mental block about buying shoes I haven't tried on, and I haven't seen them in stores. That's what I should do, of course, get over it, order a pair online and throw them out if they suck. I hate that being the plan, but now we are getting into 'having issues'.
LB, they really aren't expensive; go ahead and order them online. That said, I doubt you'll have any problems with them not fitting properly. The toe-part has three interwoven bands that have a lot of room to loosen if necessary, and the ankle-buckle is, of course, adjustable. I broke in this current pair in about a day.
However, you should pay attention to whatever sizing chart they provide online. I generally wear an 8 in woman's shoes, or 38 in European sizes, and my Saltwater sandals are size 6, which is what I am in men's shoes.
LB, I'd be surprised if the men you work for have ever seen your shoes, or if they've seen them, they've registered even the tiniest opinion. Obviously I don't know them. And I'm an outlier* on this subject, and so will shut up. (I also appreciate that in your career arc, you're something like Al Gore in October 2000: you have to worry about butterfly ballots, hanging chads, overvotes, and all sorts of other things that matter only at margins. Rather, you're maybe like Al Gore should have been . . .)
* We stayed casual when the boom crested, to the consternation of people who think there are people who think I'm going to win their case by wearing a tie while I write the brief. I'm glad, because ties are stupid, and The Man needed to be taken down several notches anyway. I have 4 pairs of cowboy boots that I wear to work, summer or winter, dressed up or casual, jury or bench.
LB, this site explains the sizing issues better than I did. Also: I like the dark brown model they're showing!
Famously, Al Gore had to worry about these very same suit/presentation issues, because of the stupid, self-advertising advice he got. Makes you sick to remember it.
I'm sure you really don't care about about what you think of as fine distinctions, fashion-wise, and that most, bordering on all, men, including the guys I work for, feel exactly the same way.
I am also absolutely certain that you'd notice if an associate who works for you, male or female, showed up in a pair of Chuck Taylor hightops with a suit, and that if it happened often it would be taken as a strike against them in terms of professionalism. It's not that you don't notice shoes, it's that you have a broad range of shoes over which you're indifferent.
My problem is more with the shoe industry than anyone else -- shoes that are squarely, dead-center, no question professionally appropriate and easy to find and purchase are unacceptable because they make my feet bleed. Shoes that are easy to find and purchase that don't make my feet bleed are largely professionally inappropriate (basketball sneakers). Shoes that don't make my feet bleed and probably aren't professionally inappropriate are hard to find, and tend to be worrisomely close to the edge of appropriateness. Probably fine, but informal enough that it's not crazy for me to wonder if they're noticeable, and negatively so.
(And, as I always feel the need to say at the end of one of these long threads, I really don't devote all that much energy to worrying about my shoes. Honest. It just comes out in spurts of buried irritation when I've made my feet bleed by being stupid enough to buy a pair of shoes without doing months of research.)
After all my boosterism, I hope they work out for you.
Eh, thirty bucks, if they completely suck it's no big deal. I just have to walk away from my "It's very, very silly to buy shoes you haven't tried on" prejudice.
LB--you must ask the superfantastic Manolo! He is capable of resolving all your shoe problems in a highly attractive way!
I adore the prose of the Manolo, and admire the esthetic judgment as well. I do not surmise that the Manolo would be sympathetic to someone without an interest in shoes who complains of blisters.
Exactly right. Best of luck. FWIW I bought 3 of 4 pairs of boots off the internet, and they fit just fine.
ITYM "The Manolo, he is capable of resolving all of the problems of the shoes in a highly attractive way!".
LB, re. buying online: Zappos takes returns. It's a hassle, b/c then you have to go to the damn post office etc., but it beats schlepping all over town. (I suspect that sandals and comfy professional shoes are basically an unresolvable issue.)
Dorothy, please! A lady never admits her feet hurt.
I'm sure you really don't care about about what you think of as fine distinctions, fashion-wise, and that most, bordering on all, men, including the guys I work for, feel exactly the same way.
God this thread makes me feel like a freak. Am I the only guy here who notices women's shoes, and has definite opinions about them one way or another?
My definite opinion is that they're a giant PITA. I hate, hate, hate sitting in a store trying to be all helpful and shit while my wife tries on shoes. And my own feet are difficult to fit, so it takes way more time than I want to spend to find anything other than another pair like whatever old worn-out ones I'm trying to replace. I've been wearing basically the same model of running shoes for probably 10 years.
i sort of pay attention to shoes, but mostly because the woman probably spent a lot of time picking them out. what i really don't get is women caring about guy's shoes. there's like 3 kinds, and they're all boring.
There's such a thing as well-made or badly-made, attention to detail or not, etc.
well, the same could be said for, say, belts. or jackets. shoes are pretty small and way down on the ground.
Indeed, and women (read: me) notice men's clothes, too.
i'm just saying they seem to be given undue emphasis.
