I started to watch God Save My Shoes hoping it might be insightful. In my teens and twenties I was quite shoe-crazy and had many very uncomfortable ones. Ownership of the shoes felt ridiculously good and when I first started working, buying a pair on payday was a form of celebration of independence. Those years are all a haze now but my feet show the wear and tear from that time even though I stopped wearing "stylish" shoes a long time ago and high heels even earlier than that. It has been very much back to basics and mundane. My shoes no longer aim to make any statements of fashion or personality. They only need to serve one purpose - be comfortable enough to walk five miles in.
The one explanation for why women have this thing for shoes that came from the documentary made good sense to me. When you are trying on clothes or accessories, the process can be quite draining - nothing ever feels right. It's rare to the experience the joy of finding the perfect fit. The mirrors in the dressing room cast a woman in the most unflattering light - I have always wondered about that. Why not have a trick mirror that creates a perception of perfection instead, wouldn't that move the product faster. The shoe does not pose such challenges. A woman does not look bad in any shoe she chooses to wear. That makes the choice infinite. She can feel good about her decision to buy just about anything. The only issue is about practicality and comfort which to many comes much later.
I can think of some other things that fit that same category - glass bangles (which I had very large collections of and still have plenty lot of). They are always perfect and there is no such thing as a "wrong" glass bangle. So women tend to get a lot of them and replenishing the ones that break along the way. The bindi is similar too - hard to get wrong and there is nothing that would not work for a specific woman given the right occasion. I had just never connected these things as being related which they might very well be.
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