THE £80,000 SHOE-AHOLICS – March 8^th 2006

 

Believe it or not, this is what a woman spends on shoes in her lifetime.

 

 

othing makes you feel quite as fabulous as a new pair of shoes. I’ll never forget my first pair of Jimmy Choos, a delicate pair of high-heeled diamante-encrusted sandals that made me feel like Cinderella. The £350 price-tag hurt like a blistered toe, but I told myself it would be worth it.

 

After all, I’d never grow out of these shoes, would I? Middle-aged spread could come and go, I could develop a dowager’s hump, arthritis could turn my hands into claws but my Jimmy Choos would still fit.

 

And I’m not alone in thinking like this. Last weekend, 34 A-list stars wore Jimmy Choos to the Oscars – each pair fitted with its own jelly-cushioned pads to ensure no-one was limping by the end of the night.

 

I found myself touching the protective cloth bag around my pair every time I opened the wardrobe door, like a good-luck talisman. Finally, the day came to wear them. I’d been invited to the Queen’s Birthday Party at the British Embassy in Rome; a fitting event, I thought, to christen my beloved new sandals.

 

For four hours, I chatted to the great and the good, rendered their equal by the sheer quality of my footwear. And when I got home, I spent nearly as long soaking my poor aching feet (sadly, mine didn’t come with the gel pads.)

 

But did that stop me from wearing them again, the next time high society called? Or from battering my credit card over and over with their lust-have high-heeled sisters? Of course not.

 

I have half-a-dozen pairs of shoes in my wardrobe that I’ve never even worn, even though they cost me as much as a small car from Eastern Europe.

 

The purple ribbon-tie pumps, for example…they’re just waiting for the right dress (it’s been three years, but I haven’t given up hope). Or the teetering red mules just like the ones Olivia Newton-John wore in the final scene of Grease. I saw them in a shop window and thought: ‘You’re the ones that I want!’ Even though the last pair were two sizes too small.

 

There’s a simple reason women love shoes – they don’t make us look fat. No matter how flabby we feel, shoes fit perfectly every time. In fact, the right pair of high heels can knock pounds off us.

 

But we don’t feel the same way about hats or belts, for example, though bags come close.

 

According to a new survey, the average woman spends three months of her life and nearly £80,000 shopping for shoes. Well, I must be the girl who averages out the nun with just two sensible pairs to her name.

 

I am a shoe fanatic, I confess. At the last count, I had around 75 pairs lined up on shelves in my custom-made wardrobe, which has 10 shelves of shoe baskets – and that doesn’t include trainers and flip-flops.

 

My addiction stems from the ongoing trauma of being born with big feet. By the time I was 13, I was a size eight-and-a-half, which meant that it was impossible to find anything other than granny shoes or men’s boots to fit.

 

My mother couldn’t understand my obsession with footwear. As soon as I was old enough to earn, all I wanted to buy was pretty shoes. I’d scour shops up and down the country in search of the one or two pairs on the planet in my size.

 

 

nd thus was born my love affair with sandals. The point is, you can cheat with sandals. I could squeeze into a size smaller than usual and get away with it. And there’s nothing like a pair of stilettos to make a girl’s foot look teeny-tiny, which is a priority when you could waterski without need of equipment.

 

A heel elongates the leg and increases the arch of the foot, making it appear smaller.

It raises the buttocks, and curves the back, pushing the chest forward. In other words, it turns an ordinary woman into a sex siren.

 

But shoes – flat, strappy or heeled – as well as boots are now a passion, a hobby, a personal statement, a source of authority, sexual independence and joy. They’re a constant obsession in pop culture, endlessly talked about and fetishized in television, and even song lyrics – think These Boots Are Made For Walking.

 

In the smash series Sex And The City, shoes (or should I say Manolos) were a main theme. At one point, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie is unable to afford the deposit on a flat, even though she has $40,000 worth of shoes in her wardrobe. As she quips: ‘I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes.’

 

Carrie knew that you can tell a lot about a girl from her shoes: her confidence and how much she’s willing to sacrifice for style. For men, comfort is probably their top priority in shoe shopping. For women, it’s usually at the bottom of her wish list and that’s if it even figures in the equation at all.

 

When I got married in December, I had a pair of four-inch crimson velvet boots made that laced right up to my knees. They cost more than my wedding dress and crucified my feet but they were worth it.

 

A great pair of shoes fills us with a sense of pride, achievement and excitement; it makes us glad to be a woman. And you can’t put a price on that. As Madonna once said of design guru Manolo Blahnik:’His shoes are better than sex!’ And (apologies to my new husband) she’s right.