Because you can't have depths without surfaces.
Linda Grant, thinking about clothes, books and other matters.
Pure Collection Ltd.
Net-a-porter UK

Sunday 16 March 2008

Can I dance in these?


Justine Picardie advances a theory about unwearable shoes.

What, exactly, is the point, you might well ask? You probably won't be able to walk very far in these shoes, and you certainly can't run in them; so what is one meant to do with them? Put them on a mantelpiece, like a quirky sculpture? This is always an option - a perverse one, I grant you - but I have a theory, borne out by years of personal practice, that if you love a pair of beautiful shoes, however fantastical, you are miraculously able to dance in them. Thus the right heels - and you know them when you find them - will lift the spirits as well as the feet.

I would sneer, but I have a pair of Kurt Geiger red suede stilettos, bought in 1999 which I adored and found them perfectly comfortable. I was looking at them yesterday with a view to sending them off to a new home at the Cancer Research shop, and I was asking myself why I didn't find them so comfortable any more. And Justine might have answered that: that I no longer love them as I once did.