My Love Affair with High Heels
It seems hard to believe now that I never used to wear heels. I think I was frightened of them – frightened that I’d fall over, or that I wouldn’t be able to walk in them, or that the heel would snap as soon as I put my weight on it. I remember my friend at college sternly lecturing me when I was seventeen about the fact that I only ever wore ugly trainers. So, one day, I took the plunge and bought a pair of ankle boots. They had the smallest heel you could imagine but they seemed pretty daring to me at the time and I felt immensely proud of myself as I wobbled into college the next day.
I’ve moved on from that since then. I can even navigate heels when I’m drunk now - a fact of which I am immensely proud. At the Lex Trent launch party in October, I left the bar at 5am (4am if you count the clocks going back), and walked all the way back upstairs to my room in 10 cm heels without falling over once! That’s the mark of the true professional, that is. No more bruised knees for me (I’ll never forget the look of horror on the faces of my Mum and Aunt the time I got undressed at the spa only to give away that both my knees were black – an unfortunate consequence of trying to navigate a cobbled street in heels outside a pub after a night of drinking). Here is the fantastically named Jezebel shoe:
Yep, I’m a dab hand at the high heel thing now. I’ve got a weakness for a pretty shoe. It tends to play out like this:
But then, just as I’m reaching for my wallet to buy the shoes, I realise that they’re made of leather or suede or that they’re almost vegan but not quite because they have leather soles. And I have to put them back on the shelf and weep because my ethics prohibit me from buying the shoe no matter how pretty it is. So, for a long time after discovering my love of heels, I had to stick to ugly flat shoes because there were no pretty vegan heels. That’s not the case anymore, however. The Jezebel shoe above is entirely vegan and came from Dune, which is a great place to find dressy animal-friendly heels. I also got the shoes for my Jasmyn party there, as blogged about here.
Sadly, many of my shoes have met a messy end since I got my Great Dane (sob! I had to learn to keep my shoes away from her the hard way) but one of my favourite pairs to have survived Moose are these Vivienne Westwood Melissa Lady Dragon heels, made entirely from rubber plastic that smells like bubblegum:
And then, of course, there is Beyond Skin, which makes the best selection of the most beautiful vegan shoes I have ever seen anywhere. I have never seen an ugly shoe on their website.
I went to a baby shower last weekend and was going to buy a babygro or something but then I found these:
A teeny tiny pair of Ugg lookalike booties. So, so cute. I couldn’t stop taking them out of the bag and looking at ‘em once I got home. And whilst browsing the Vivienne Westwood website today I found these:
Are they not gorgeous? The Vivienne Westwood Mini Melissa. I feel like I must have a baby at once in order to be able to buy these shoes. Still, perhaps that’s taking the love of high heels just a little bit too far. Splashing out a week’s wages or suffering from toe blisters is one thing - a proportionate sort of sacrifice. Getting knocked up for the sake of a shoe is probably in a different league of shoe obsession altogether. A slippery slope into madness, no less. And if you’re going to go crazy then it ought rightly to be for reasons a bit more lofty and impressive than the love of a baby Viv Westwood shoe, no matter how fabulous it is.
