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From: Eva Category: Life Date: 30 November 2006 Time: 09:11 AM Review: In the last month I have heard two people repeat that old adage that you can tell the class of a person by the standard of their footwear. Class here being a stand-in for classiness as much as for the British class system. This notion has always irritated me, possibly because I wear one pair of comfortable and neutral (boring) trainer-shoes until they wear out which I then replace with a simliarly practical pair. I have a couple of pairs of ‘classy’ shoes that get worn on special occasions. This probably makes me a complete dag. Okay, I have shoe prejudices too. For starters I hate short men with heels, unless they’re queens, it’s partly the noise and inevitable sway. It’s one thing to be taller than the man you’re talking to, quite another to be taller even though he’s on tip-toes. High heels are great if you’re a tall woman wanting to make all the men around you look even shorter. I guess this is heading towards a heightist dead-end where physical stature is a stand-in for power, the extreme being Charles Rays’ power-dressing giant business woman. Maybe it’s a throw back to a time in childhood when the girls were physically bigger and stronger than boys of the same age; I certainly wouldn't mind being more physically dominant again. Taken to extreme though, when a very tall woman wears the highest heels, it does look odd. Then there are the shoes that look like they come from Where the Wild Things Are – those kind of cow/sack rolled layers of fur lined boots, inappropriate for city or country. They are on my burn list and I make assumptions about the people who wear them. I do like heels worn with the right trousers, bearing in mind that polyester city trousers are never the right trousers. I’m thinking more a 1950s On the Waterfront look. When people try to tell the class of a person according to their footwear the only clear winner seems to be patent leather hand- crafted shoes, polished with love every day. I’m never going to be the person who can look after those, or even walk in them without skidding. The bottom line is I judge people by the shoes they wear, but it upsets me to think that I could also be judged (and ‘fail’) by such a standard. Shame we can’t all go barefoot like Heidi, but then I’d be moaning about the state of people's pedicures.