It started in 1997 when Motherbear went to London. She came home from a European Odyssey with her mother and greeted me at the airport with a 5-kilogram French-English dictionary (superseded 10 years later by Google translate) and a pair of red patent leather Doctor Marten boots. Worn almost everyday for 7 years, they became the first of three pairs that I have owned in this lifetime. All the more significantly, those boots spawned a more-than-a-little-bit obsessive compulsion to forever wear only red shoes.
Stored on their insanely expensive matching red tower, I was a bit emotional the day I bought it, here they all are. Running the gamut of sequinned slippers, to the rubber Cath Kidston Wellingtons, passing by sheepskin boots and Chuck Taylors, ballerinas and heels, in all shapes a sizes, seeing me through all four seasons in scarlet style, and I love them.
Shoes in France are brown and black.
It is my observation, which let’s face it, I spend a lot of time sitting in bars and restaurants on my own staring melancholically (and ever so slightly inebriated) at the people around me, the French, while always immaculately groomed and swathed in only the most fashionable items from the little French fashion boutiques they love so much, Sandro, The Kooples and Comptoir des Cotonniers, prefer a palette drawn directly from a Monet or a Manet or a Renoir. Twenty shades of the same colour worn in a multitude of layers so that up close she looks impressionistically messy but from far away she looks like an oil painting (boom boom). French women look fantastic, but it is generally a chromatically limited mash up of beige, cream, taupe, ecru, buff, camel, parchment, sand, oatmeal, mushroom and nude.
I am more of a primary colours kind of girl. Is it because I am not French? Is it because I style myself like a children’s cartoon character from the 1960’s? Or is it because I am not about vague and airy-fairy impressions preferring the in or out definition of the renaissance. I am more of a Botticelli girl. Sandro B preferred to swathe his women in the brightest of red, blue and green silks, always with contrasting yellow tresses and opulent jewels. Which may explain why the establishment think he might have been more than a passing fan of ABBA, Ab Fab and Judy. And like me, his girls all have childbearing hips and great big curly fluffed flying in the wind hair, not a sleek brown Frenchy chignon like Manet’s Olympia.
Colour makes me happy, and this autumn’s trend for colour blocking makes me even happier; turquoise, red and orange, all at the same time if you please. H&M currently looks like someone vomited M&M’s and liquorice allsorts onto the sales floor. Even that paean of mass produced but expensive enough to be exclusive European fashion, Zara, has gone all ruby and sapphire and emerald for the season. It is like a teased and crimped and Spokey-Dokey’d eighties incarnation of YSL at his absolute campy best. I know he was French, but he was also gay which means he was more crimson than a cream kind of guy.
Beyond this season’s trends, there is something more special about red shoes.
Christian Louboutin, arguably the worlds most famous shoe designer crafts every single pair of his shoes with red soles. Posh, Madge and Kylie are all fans, tottering high above the rest of us, the hoi polloi, on their spiky stilts, as expensive as a down payment on a flat in the eighth arrondissement and dangerous enough to throw out your back, which Posh recently did, forcing her, shock horror, to be confined to the lower echelons of society in, front page of the paper, flat shoes for a month.
The fact that Christian confines his colour to the underside of the shoe, the part that gets shmushed against all of the fag-ends, man-wee and dog-poo on the streets of Paree is oh so very French. The colourful bit is hidden away from view, and considered sexy because you can only see it if a woman walks away. Women in France have truly perfected the art of playing hard to get and Christian took it, cut it out of red leather and created a brand and a multi-million dollar empire out of it. *
Favouring the “I am here, in the room, right now, so look at me” approach, I tend to err on the side of hiding the beige (Bridget Jones undies and the like) and the grey (mostly moods) well enough away and covering the visible portion with colour and an admittedly sometimes forced, smile. I can’t understand the benefit, in a grey world, with a grey sky and grey thoughts, of blending into the weather and moping. That is why Jesus changed the water into wine.
It is also possible that maybe I am wishing upon a star that I’ll wake up where the clouds are far behind me.
Dorothy, she who made the song famous, and I have a lot in common. We both have a passion for ruby red slippers and show tunes. We share exceptionally dressed and shod Wicked friends (or enemies) and spend great portions of our day surrounded by miniature people who speak far too quickly in a foreign tongue. We’ve been led on a merry adventure by a tin man without a heart and seem fatally predetermined to get to a place called Oz.
She and I also spend far too much time daydreaming, wishing upon stars and pretending that life is a fairytale.
*In a recent lawsuit in the US Monsieur Louboutin also tried to patent the ubiquitous red leather sole and lost. In the land of the free, you can say what you like, carry a gun, shoot a bison and wear a red leather soled shoe. Sarah Palin made a vice-presidential campaign out of doing exactly that.
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