Walking in My Shoes

Shoes are complicated. After struggling with my footwear for the past couple of years, I'm finally starting to find peace.

Shoes from the book ‘Prada’ (2009)

I’ve been thinking about shoes a lot lately. For the last couple of years I’ve been complaining about my “shoe game”, i.e. lack of versatile, stylish shoes in my closet. My shoe misery reaches its highest levels during winter when I am stuck wearing chunky winter boots due to the difficult sidewalk conditions in Southern Finland. In the winter months I lament the lack of variety in my shoe options almost daily, but when I think about it, I struggle with my shoes, no matter what the season. There’s a handful of pairs that I wear actively, but currently about two thirds of my shoes remain practically unworn. For some time I’ve been thinking that maybe I should just buy more shoes to fix the problem.

Up until a few years ago I kept things simple: I wore shoes that I was drawn to, and shoes that were also comfortable. When I began to watch Tibi Style Class actively in late 2020, I became convinced that my shoes were, for the most part, all wrong. I had previously known that there was something about wearing vintage shoes that could really date your whole look, for example, but the Style Class’ shoe episodes opened up a completely different can of worms. Amy Smilovic and Dione Davis taught me that matching your top with your shoes was “basic”, that traditional Birkenstocks that I love were not modern but “crunchy”, that there existed a category of shoes that should only be worn by elves, and who could forget the never-ending skin sandwich discussion. I was intrigued, because I could, for the most part, theoretically see what Amy and Dione were talking about, but at the same time I felt troubled. All these rules that weren’t rules! Amy and Dione would say that if the issues that were raised in Style Class didn’t bother me, it would be fine… that whole “if you want to look like Shutterstock Susie here, that’s fine!”... but it really isn’t fine, is it? No one wants to feel like they’re Shutterstock Susie. 

It occurred to me the other day that the reason why I’ve struggled with shoes for the past few years is because out of all the things that reside in my wardrobe, I respond to shoes with a gut instinct the most. When someone whose style chops I admired told me that my gut instinct was perhaps quite basic and not stylish… Well, being the over-thinker that I am, it led to trouble. I started to second-guess myself. That’s where I’ve been with shoes for the last couple of years: I’ve been doubting my shoe instincts, questioning my taste levels, and wondering if my approach to shoes had to be completely disbanded and reassembled. My latest two newsletters have been about leaning into what you are naturally drawn to, and after careful consideration I feel like I am now confident going back to my instincts when it comes to shoes. 

I have three gears when it comes to shoes: love, hate, and don’t care. I actively dislike most shoes that are out there on the market. I tend to have an adverse reaction to practically all “it” shoes. There are also a lot of shoes that I just don’t care about one way or another. It turns out that I have a very narrow, specific taste when it comes to shoes: I love my Birkenstocks for their comfort factor. I like shoes that have laces. I want my shoes to be made of leather. I love a good lace-up ankle boot. I have a real soft spot for woven shoes. I need a flat sole and a heel no higher than one or one-and-a-half inches. I gravitate toward shoes in black, brown or other neutral color. I practically never wear colorful shoes, and when I have bought them and tried to wear them, I have felt “off” in them. I don’t get wear out of shoes that have too many details like straps, tassels, rhinestones, bows or studs. Instead, I am drawn to relatively classic and simple shoes. In other words, I want my shoes to be practical and functional, and for the most part, almost unnoticeable. 

When it comes to shoes, I really know what I like and don’t like. Huzzah! That puts me in a pretty good place, but just like everything in life, it’s complicated. More often than not, there are other things at play than just our superficial likes and dislikes. Maybe more than any other garment or accessory on your body, your shoes signal your social status, taste, and identity to others. Shoes are not just shoes. 

The ancient Greeks began wearing symbolic footwear to indicate the status of the wearer as early as around 4 BC. It’s ingrained in us fashion lovers that if nothing else, it’s our shoes that will tell others who we are on the social ladder, and then some. Shoes have power – just ask Cinderella, or Dorothy. In the 1994 movie by the same name, Forrest Gump said: “Momma always said there’s an awful lot you can tell about a person by their shoes… where they’ve gone, where they’ve been”. Or maybe you remember this scene from Crazy, Stupid, Love (2009) where Cal’s (played by Steve Carrell) worn out dad sneakers were so disgusting to Jacob (Ryan Gosling) that he threw them off the railing at the mall. In Strangers on a Train, the brilliant Alfred Hitchcock film from 1951, in the scene where the film’s protagonist Guy Hanes (Farley Granger) meets the charming psychopath Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), the latter’s flashy, two-toned brogues are prominently displayed. Just from looking at his shoes, we know that the man is trouble, even before a line is spoken. 

You know the saying ‘before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes’? It turns out that we are actually prone to judging the man on the basis of his shoes. Forrest Gump was right: research suggests that our shoes reveal certain things about our age, gender, income and even attachment anxiety to the people around us. The shoes we wear get noticed, people judge us on the basis of our footwear, and they actually get a fair amount of things right from just superficially observing the shoes. Shoes are linked to our ideas about gender: professional menswear advice very often focuses on the necessity of wearing sharp shoes: a man who wears scuffed up shoes with a nice suit is automatically a suspicious character. In Gentleman — A Timeless Guide to Fashion (1999), the author Bernhard Roetzel writes: “It would be better to go through life barefoot or wearing just socks, citing religious reasons or the theft of one’s luggage, than to lose face by wearing cheap shoes.” The stereotype of the quirky shoe-crazed woman that we all know from Sex and the City and a bunch of romantic comedies is quite rooted in us, too. Women are supposed to go ga-ga over flashy and trendy footwear. 

Just like with clothing, there’s no point in buying something just because it’s trendy, but with shoes, it’s even more important to only buy what you will love and actually wear. Over 22 billion pairs of shoes were manufactured in 2021. 90% of all shoes eventually end up in landfills because their materials are very difficult to separate and recycle. This means that choosing quality is paramount to ensure a long product lifespan, but as shoe manufacturing has become faster and cheaper, and the shoe trend cycle keeps spinning out of control, the quality of footwear has plummeted. A large proportion of shoes are now made of petroleum-derived, unrenewable materials, and as a result, shoes don’t last the way they used to. The second hand market for shoes mostly deals with rare collectibles and shoes that were bought by mistake and barely worn. Shoes that people actually wore a lot get thrown out, and onto the landfill they go. (Sometimes they don’t even make it to the landfill: a friend of mine, who is an avid hiker, told me that fifteen years ago the Appalachian Trail was littered with broken Crocs and other plastic shoes that people had just thrown out.) It takes a thousand years for a certain type of sneaker sole to decompose. Let that sit with you for a while: a thousand years.

I’ve been re-thinking about what it means to get a lot of wear out of your clothes, and for the purpose of this newsletter, shoes. When I wrote Sunday Style Thoughts on Instagram Stories last year, I had a discussion about what “a lot of wear” means. If you wear something once a week, it will take you a whole year to get to 50 wears. If you live in a climate where you have to have seasonal shoes, it will take you several years to get what we might consider “a lot of wear” out of something. The more options you have, the longer it takes for each individual item to get “a lot of wear”, assuming that you wear all of your options equally. You should replace shoes after having worn them actively for eight to twelve months, but since we’re talking about active wear and you probably won’t wear the same shoes every day, it might take you years to get to eight to twelve months of actual wear. Athletic shoes will last for about 500 miles of walking or running before their inner structure begins to crumble (these are the ones that might take up to a thousand years to decompose). Good quality leather shoes should last anywhere from five to fifteen years, or even a lifetime, with adequate care and maintenance, when worn actively. So I encourage you to look at the shoes in your closet: are you getting wear out of your shoes? How quickly will you get tired of them? How often do you buy new shoes, and what will happen to the shoes that you no longer wear?

It has occurred to me that when it comes to shoes, when I get them right for my life, taste, and comfort needs, I actually get a ton of wear out of them. As fickle as I sometimes think I am, and as lost as I feel when it comes to over-buying and having a wardrobe that I can’t make sense of, I really commit to my favorite shoes. I feel emotionally attached to them. I don’t feel like I need to revamp them or come up with styling tricks to keep them interesting. I don’t feel like I need a lot of options, and I don’t feel the need to challenge myself. When they’re right, they’re right. I don’t think I’ve experienced it with anything else in my wardrobe, except maybe with my Dries Van Noten Podium trousers that I am always going on about, and the Yohji Yamamoto jacket I bought at the thrift store last year. Wearing these clothes feels like I am home, and that’s how I think my footwear should also make me feel. 

I make mistakes with shoes when I compromise with comfort, go for a look or a trend, over-think, and try too hard. I believe that my shoes shouldn’t feel like an extension of a style I’m trying to pull off, or an accessory that will brighten my outfit or balance my proportions. My shoes should be a part of me: almost invisible, seamlessly integrated. I wonder if the same could be true for my clothes, too, but I’m just not quite there yet, mentally?

Some years ago I found the perfect pair of black derbies at a flea market. They were very simple, comfortable and light, and they were made of supple leather. They were already pretty scuffed when I bought them, but they still had some life in them yet. I wore them with pretty much anything and everything in my wardrobe, and I wore them until they literally fell apart. It is my biggest wardrobe-related regret that I threw them out in the end. I should have taken them to the cobbler one more time, to see if they could have been salvaged. I am still looking for a replacement pair, three years later. I now have a trusted cobbler I go to, and I’ve learned that a good cobbler can perform miracles. A pair of good quality shoes can be patched, re-soled entirely, widened and lengthened, among other things. 

There’s a lot of pressure out there to get your footwear right. If you feel persuaded to pick your shoes based on trends or what someone else tells you is cool and current, where does that leave you, your personal style story, and your identity? If you follow your own preferences and happen to love and wear shoes that the style gurus or just the people around you might find dated or basic, it might not be a comfortable position to be in either. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, right? I think the only thing we can do is to commit to our shoes. To wear them and hold onto them, to take care of them. (Use cobbler services!) Don’t let shoe trends distract you too much. Find out what you love and then wear it. It will just take a little effort to carve your own path, put on your shoes, and walk the miles.