Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.
–Marilyn Monroe
Susan here, with our Ask-A-Wench topic for August - shoes! With all the traveling and summer wandering the Wenches have been doing, what sort of footwear keeps us going? And is there a historical style of footwear that looks comfortable? Here's what we came up with --
Pat says:
I am a tenderfoot with issues. I cannot go barefoot. It’s painful. But I cannot wear enclosed shoes because my feet are two different sizes, and if there’s a back on them, the heel will rub on one and the toes be crushed in the other. I love mules, which keep my toes warm, don’t have backs that rub, and allow enough space not to crush toes. My favorites for walking are Easy Spirit. In summer, it’s sandals all the way—not the kind with straps between the toes, please. Flip-flops hurt too.
So I guess historically, I’d have to live in Roman times and wear those really cool sandals that wrap up the leg or maybe the lovely Regency-style mules, except they all seem to have pointed toes and high heels—for dancing, ouch.
Andrea says:
There are many fashionistas who will pay astronomical prices for impossibly high-heeled, pointy toed, delicate leather odes to Artistic Inspiration. I am not one of them. I do confess, however that I’m not quite ready to wear sneakers with everything either. My go-to “dress” shoes are a simple black pump with nicely rounded toe, a sturdy one inch heel and rubber non-slip sole. (I’m short in the legs and like a little extra lift so my pants don’t drag in the mud.) They’re super comfortable and have a classic look that works for a range of occasions. (For dressier times, I have a pair that are two inches high. As I said, I believe in keeping it simple!)
Now, what really fills my closet are sports shoes and boots—tennis, squash, hiking and golf all require tech footwear in cool colors and textures. Those are the ones I get excited about.
Joanna says:
My name is Joanna and I am a Volvo-driving, trash-recycling, organic-crunchy-granola-eating . . . hippie. Nothing to be done about it; it’s too late for me to change. I expect they’ll put me in a museum someday.
What shoes do hippies wear in the summer?
Birkenstocks, of course.
I wear them with socks. Sometimes I wear them with white socks because I am shameless in my dedication to geekdom.
Birkenstocks of the covered sort, (the ones I wear,) are stalwart protectors of my delicate toes and give my pinkies lots of room to breathe. Birkenstocks last a good long time. They slip on and off like greased lightning when I want to carry my carefully sorted trash out to my lovingly selected trash bins.
Practical and shoes of great beauty. I remain, as always, at the very forefront of fashion.
Anne says:
Anne here. I can admire a pretty pair of high-heeled shoes, but I rarely wear them. I walk a lot, and can't be bothered with discomfort for the sake of fashion, so most of my shoes are flat and comfortable. I also have a fondness for red shoes — possibly because as a child I hated the story of The Red Shoes. I thought it was perfectly reasonable to want to wear pretty red shoes instead of black ones, and the punishment that little girl faced of being forced to dance until she dropped and finally having her feet chopped off to free her of the red shoes was horrible. So I have four or five pairs of
red shoes.
I also bought a pair of red cowboy boots when I was in Texas for a Romance Writers of America conference. When I was in over there, I noticed a lot of the young women wearing floaty, pretty evening dresses with cowboy boots, and decided that was a look I could adopt, so now when I wear an evening dress (mainly at romance conferences) I often wear my red cowboy boots. I'm perfectly happy to be regarded as somewhat eccentric, because they are so comfortable. And red.
Mary Jo says:
Many women are besotted with shoes. In contemporary romances, heroines often wear sky high heels and pencil skirts. Admittedly spike heels might be appealing to the males of the species, but I don't see any of them wearing such tortuous footwear!
My one inarguable requirement for shoes is that they be comfortable. The reason for this is very simple: I don’t like pain. It seems a simple enough criterion, but it has taken me time to understand the implications of that such as:
- A) if shoes aren't comfortable in the store, don't buy them thinking they'll be broken in, because it
might be your long suffering feet which are broken.
- B) it almost never works to buy shoes online. Sigh. Once or twice I've ordered shoes that were absolutely perfect when I put them on, but mostly I ended up sending shoes back with regret. One of the happy exceptions was these LL Bean hiking shoes, which I wore comfortably across Botswana.
- C) Shoes made of soft material are likely to be more comfortable than stiff materials. Soft leather and fabric are the best. These black shoes are Portuguese and basically knitted, and they adjust to feet very nicely!
Be kind to your feet. They'll thank you!
And Susan:
I love sandals. I'll wear them all year long, even in winter -- in the house, at least. My feet don't like being confined. When I wear a closed shoe, it's usually a simple ballet flat with a good sole, or a sturdy sneaker, or a Mary Jane--all with ergonomically contoured sport soles that give the foot a little rocking motion. I had a back injury a while ago, with physical therapy, and now I stick with the healthy comfortable fit of a contoured sole that aligns feet, legs, hips, and back. Out went my beloved collection of flip-flops (with nice thick footbeds and cloth straps, and pricey - are they really flip-flops? nah!) -- and in came my new favorite shoes, Ecco sandals and sneakers. This summer I've been wearing these cute Ecco multicolor sporty sandals. And as Mary Jo says, my feet and my back are thanking me!
Here's the oldest shoe ever discovered so far - a soft laced leather jobbie from Armenia, made and
worn about 5,500 years ago. Would you wear something like this? Or how about these medieval pattens, handy for walking in muddy streets?
Or these cute little red dancing slippers from 1810? (We know Anne would love them--they're red!).
What favorite shoes have you been wearing all summer (or winter, for those south of the Equator)?
Is there a historical shoe you'd never want to wear?
Here's my pick (I wouldn't put them on one of my characters, either) - there were even more extreme variations of this, with curled points and straps to hold them up (why??)....