I must admit to having a mild phobia about shoes. It dates back to childhood, when every school year began with a new pair of regulation leather shoes, choice of black or black. After a summer of bare feet and sandals, our feet had to be "broken in" to these new shoes, and we hobbled about in agony for the first two weeks of school, taking small, careful steps and sliding like ice skaters on the smooth leather soles. Two years in army boots did nothing to improve my attitude towards footwear and, since those days, I have bought comfortable shoes very rarely and worn them for a long time.
Yet a lot of people of both sexes are passionate about shoes. Long Island has shoe stores the way Saudi Arabia has sand. There are at least a dozen outlets in the local mall, every one of them overflowing with shoes and boots in a vertiginous selection of styles and colors and sizes and widths, more than the whole population of Long Island could wear out in a dozen lifetimes.
Even more mysterious, at least to me, is the enthusiasm for sneakers. I have always thought of these as footwear for those too young to wear proper shoes – although adults these days are much younger than they used to be. Sneakers are virtually a cult. There are books about them, collectors spend serious money on them, and there is even a sneaker museum in Boston. Murders have been committed in pursuit of especially desirable sneakers. They are, it seems, a kind of fetish in the anthropological sense. A fetish is an object that is believed to contain mysterious power. In ancient times all kinds of things were believed to give such power – statues, amulets, carvings, bones, and so on.
There's nothing sinister about this, it’s only a matter of fashion and appearances. But why shoes? I don't go around staring at people's feet. Do you? It could be dangerous, you could walk into things. And feet are the least noticeable part of a person, being right down there on the ground, below display level, as it were.
But something has changed. Shoes have become more visible. So many people walk around with their eyes focused down on their phones that they must be seeing more of their own feet than they did before, and other people’s feet too. The Chinese have dubbed them the “heads down tribe,” and have created special walking lanes in some cities to avoid accidents. The heads down tribe can hardly avoid glimpsing shoes and sneakers down there all day long. So one addiction can feed the other.
I am fortunate not to own a smartphone, but I tested this theory with a borrowed one. It’s true, you can look at your phone and watch your feet at the same time. What I also learned from this exercise was that I was wearing a very disreputable pair of casual shoes that I had bought in Portugal in 2005, and that had not improved with time. Perhaps I might need a new pair?
If this is all a commercial plot to sell shoes, it is a diabolically clever one. Fortunately, as soon as I had returned my borrowed smartphone to its owner, I forgot all about shoes and carried on with my pedestrian life as if nothing had happened.
Copyright: David Bouchier
