I don't want to embarrass you by sharing unwholesome intimacies. I mean, I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am as wholesome as you are. But all my life I have had a certain interest in... shoes.
It's nothing like that. What I mean is that I can't stand for my feet to be uncomfortable. Most of my body's capacity for low-grade chronic pain is located south of the ankles, and as a result, much of my life is spent in the quest for a decent pair of shoes. I live in hope. I pause at shoe-store windows and grow glassy-eyed. My sons find the effect mildly hilarious. The Mr. Toad of footwear.
I should probably move to Cairo, where, some years ago, I saw that the owners of shoe stores had arranged rows of chairs on sidewalks outside their shops so that customers could come in the evenings to sit and stare through the windows — as if the shoes were a performance, a son et lumiere. My search for the perfect shoe has made me an inadvertent expert — a horrified expert — on shoe developments. I have noticed, as you may have, that in recent years the designs of men's and women's shoes have grown both comic and hideous. What accounts for this? Shoes proclaim the foot. Terribly ugly statements are being made. Some of the proclamations verge on the psychotic.
With my younger son humoring me because it was Father's Day, I ventured into a store that sells running shoes. Now, I grew up in a plain Keds generation: choice between white or dark blue. I considered the blue to be pretty unorthodox. So it was in white Keds as a boy that I played tennis, yachted and stole hubcaps.
The sneaker since then has gone through changes. It has specialized, subdividing into varieties for walking, tennis, basketball, running and something called "cross-training." The sneaker industry has ingested steroids and hallucinogens, and produced astonishing effects, shoes that look like cumulus clouds, or reptiles of the Amazon basin, or tarted-up space stations. Shoes have Incredible Hulked themselves (or perhaps, Robert Crumbed themselves) to assert an out-of-perspective importance — rendering the foot (an absurd appendage anyway and best underplayed) ridiculously prominent, strange shapes elaborated by irrational patchworks of neon piping and gaudy metallic iridescences.
A doggedly competitive spirit of pseudo-childish Play and Fun seems to have taken over the thinking of the sneaker industry. Something of the same archly juvenile outlandishness has been at work designing women's shoes, which have the look of illustrations in a children's story — blockish and clunkish and exaggerated. All fashion is an aesthetic of distortion. But platform shoes have risen so high you could use them to drill for oil in the Gulf. They look spectacular, even crazy, and elevate foot fashion to the status of a major social hazard. A young woman in a car who tries to lift the great block on her right foot from accelerator to brake has become as dangerous as a gang member with a Glock 9mm.
The transition from the old-fashioned high heel (which women wore when I was young) to today's model does not look to me like progress for women. The old heel may have been just as hard to walk in, but was infinitely more graceful. The new shoes look as if they have a Frankenstein life and motion of their own; young women walk in them (ungainly and swaying, waving their arms for balance) the way an inexperienced rider sits an energetic horse that is barely under control. These shoes are a dangerous responsibility. Not much liberation there. In fact, the shoes look like a kind of punitive hobbling — a way to keep the women from running away. Are the platforms related obscurely to Chinese foot-binding?
Men's street shoes have shown tendencies toward the outlandish as well, though the deformations are subtler, taking the form of ghastly square-blockishness in the toe, for example (perhaps a way of allowing a 25-year-old management trainee at Chase to think he is still wearing his Doc Martens skinhead stompers). The mistakes in men's designs — fortunately or unfortunately — do not have the (screwball) style of the women's errors. The men's shoes merely have about them an air of stolid, depressing stupidity, as if they had been designed 40 years ago in Communist Bulgaria. I trudge on.
My feet are strangers in a strange land.