Until recently, the best advice anyone has given me on buying shoes has been to do it at the end of the shopping day when my feet have expanded to full size. But finding the right pair of shoes is a more complicated art. Any style-obsessed person will tell you that shoes are the bottom line of one’s outfit, the punctuation mark to whatever fashion statement you want to make. More than making sure they fit, there are other things to look for in shoes: Are they pretty? Are they comfortable? Will they last? Or will they disintegrate into unrecognizable shreds of something that is passed off as leather the third time you wear them?
A good pair is hard to find. My mother once said, "There are shoes, and then there are shoes," She has always had the good sense to invest in style and quality as far back as the late Seventies. The cyclical nature of fashion has made the shoe styles of more than two decades white-hot once again, and my mother, who still has a few pairs in good condition, looks cooler than my trendy younger sister.
"You must train your eye," my mom always tells me, as though she was shelling out advice on finding Mr. Right. After all, shoes have, in some sense, a number of parallels with a dream guy: easy on the eyes, durability through tough times, service, loyalty, the ability to take you places, staying power.
I bought my school shoes from Gregg. The shoes my mom bought from a shoe store in Goldcrest Arcade, back in the early Eighties, are still in mint condition. She can’t resist gloating at me every time my "Made in Italy" sandals break and I have a limp or drag my feet all the way back home, all the while trying to look as though it’s no big deal. And to think I found the sandals at a store in Quad 4 for a steal – Italian made for P2,300! My mom said, "If those were a man, you’d be a widow."
Many of us are not as level-headed when it comes to what we wear on our feet. Take, for instance, our obsession with all shoes imported. The tiny Made in Italy on the shoe label has a strange way of pushing some women’s wits to the backburner. Once, a friend made a huge production of slipping her shoes off and examining an imagined scratch in order to call attention to her new pair. After much theatrical whining about the "damage," we finally decided to be polite and pay attention. Because she looked so distraught, someone asked if they had cost her a lot, to which she sniffed self-importantly and replied, "Not really, but they’re made in Italy."
Her remark was followed by what seemed like five long minutes of puzzled silence. We struggled to find the Italian features not in the leather that had "I’m really cheap" written all over it, not in the circa 1998 style, not in the precarious way the upper was glued to the sole. Did the makers use sticky rice as adhesive?
Sometimes the label on a pair of shoes should actually read "Made in Italy By Way of China." To the superficially-trained eye, an eye that is satisfied with how the label reads and does not bother to inspect how the shoes are made, even the Baclaran-esque will do.
Viva Italia? Some enterprising shoe dealers who take full advantage of our passion for everything made elsewhere except the Philippines, buy their merchandise by the kilo from the "Baclarans" of Italy, the US, Spain and Hong Kong, and dump them here (some don’t even come in boxes). These shoes are then sold for three to five times the original price. Despite the cost of shipping the shoes over to Manila, these are displayed on glass racks at Megamall and sold for P1,000 or less. Something’s fishy here, don’t you think?
Or worse, imported platform shoes are sometimes used merely as packaging to smuggle in shabu. I don’t think the culprits will bother to make sure these shoes are well-crafted with fine genuine leather and adhesive to make sure they will last a few months, if not weeks. Perhaps as long as they look as unsuspicious as shoes, they will do. After the drugs have been smuggled in, the shoes are then sold at P500 or so a pair in tiangges or even at the mall. Quite a bargain? Not when these shoes begin to flap open when the temperature changes ever so slightly and whose cheap brittle leather will crack and chip off like the paint of an old house.
But some of us get too label-crazy. An aunt actually passed up a pair from Via Venetto (and haughtily declined my mother’s offer to try and find something nice somewhere else).
To her feet’s detriment, this same aunt once walked into a shoe store at Greenbelt and began her shopping by flipping shoes to check if they were imported, or made in Italy as claimed. The pair she picked amounted to P3,000, even if the store claimed to be on a mega-ultra-super "mother of all sales" sale.
And despite the pair being horribly uncomfortable – the leather so stiff she had to pull out her nearly-bleeding feet to exhale every hour or so – my aunt wore the shoes to a dinner party. Ill-fitting shoes have a great way of calling attention to themselves – after all, what’s on your feet will reflect in your smile, and uncomfortable shoes can put a certain nervous twitch on your lips.
Of course, my aunt is a lucky woman – compared to another friend whose blind taste for imported shoes led her to buy a hideous-looking pair for P1,650 simply because, "It’s from Italy, noh." Right away the shoe’s Baclaran-esque features showed, and I warned her about the quality of these shoes. Haughty and determined to show off, she wore the pair to a wedding where she had a role of secondary sponsor. When it was her turn to light the candles, she began to walk up the short steps to the altar and the heel of her left shoe broke all of a sudden and there was a loud, collective gasp from the audience.
With Herculean effort, she lit the candle even as her own cheeks were burning in embarrassment, and limped back to her seat. Refusing to go barefoot, she likewise limped down the aisle during the exit procession.
You’re better off buying a locally-crafted pair from a reputable shoemaker. I can almost hear my mother saying, "Buying a pair from a tried-and-tested store that’s been around for a long time is like, among other things, paying to make sure you don’t get publicly humiliated."
After all, if you’ve got some place to go and important things to do, you shouldn’t really have to think whether or not you’ll be barefoot when you come face to face with the interview of your career or the date of your life.