No Shoes for You

Boots by John Fluevog I will never own.

Every now and then just to punish myself I get online and look for shoes. Now that the weather is cooler and wetter I have fallen into my boot rut. I have 2 pairs of Blundstones, one round toe and one chisel toe. The chisel toes are my town boots and the round toes are the boots I wear daily around my place. When I am feeling fancy I pull on the Italian boots I bought last fall in NYC. They have been a good addition to the boot collection at Rowanville.

Here is the problem. The other day I was getting dressed and I was thinking I am tired of wearing all these boots I would like to put on shoes. I was struck by two things; a) I have no shoes, and b) I can't even picture a pair of shoes I would like to wear. The reason I find myself in this predicament is that I have turned off that place in my womanly brain wherein we think about shoes, seek shoes out, and buy said shoes which in turn enables us to wear fabulous shoes to every occasion. I can't buy shoes like a regular person. I have size 14 feet which makes sense as I am over six feet tall. I don't really want high heels, I am tall enough as it is now. I just want some cute girl shoes, Mary-Janes, ballet flats, mules, whatever. But they are not to be found in any great quantity or variety. Because of this I can't even really pin point what I would want in a shoe. It's too painful and wasteful to think about. What is the point of dreaming if your dream will never be realized. For years I have worn mens shoes and this has worked to a point. As long as I dress in a semi androgenous way I am fine but the second I want to look and feel like a girly-girl I feel the cold hard slap down of reality. I dont fit society's idea of what size a woman is supposed to be.

There are companies who make shoes for us tall gals but their proportions are often all off. A woman who is 5' 3" weighing about 130lbs and wears a size 8 shoe requires totally different engineering than me at 6'1" and 83kilos (I chose metric so you can't really tell my weight without doing some math, hah!). I am a bigger heavier person and I can't just slip into some flimsy shoe that has been lengthened based on a smaller design, it simply doesn't work. I found an okay shoe on the Nordstrom site last night, but that is it, one pair of shoes in the whole world that sort of look okay to me. Who knows if they will fit.

I spoke with a shoe designer awhile back about custom shoes which I could have made at great expense. They are works of art. This man worked with John Fluevog in the 70's and so the shoes have that vague Stevie Nicks vibe to them which is not quite my speed. They are gorgeous and well crafted. I considered (for about 5 seconds) learning to make my own shoes. Can you imagine what they might look like? Carved from wood with moss and fern accents.

What I really want to do is start my own online shoestore wherein I convince established shoe companies to make a few bigger sizes for women. We are getting bigger. When I was a teenager and needed shoes no one went over size 11. When I moved to LA in my late teens I discovered in some of the black burroughs larger sizes for that population and made trips to central LA now and then to get a few pairs but the styles were still lacking. I know I would be selling to a small customer base but man if I could make one other person feel happy about their big feet I'd feel vindicated.