37. Parade Of Shoes
Alright, time to lighten up a bit. Let me tell you a story. A million years ago (well, about twenty, anyway) when I lived in New York City and had one of those ‘promising’ jobs with a smart-looking office and my name on the door, I was witness to a groundbreaking change in the world of commuting: women began wearing sneakers and white socks over their staid, beige pantyhose, and carrying their snappy work shoes in shoulder bags. I certainly understood the practical motivation, having walked all over the city and having stood waiting for more buses and subway trains than I could ever have counted. Still, it made me wonder: was there an implication that they cared what impression they made on co-workers, but not on Manhattan’s sidewalk populace, surely among the world’s most fashion-appreciative pedestrians? Did these perky work gals consider their time out and about in the city to be somehow less important, maybe even less real than time spent at their desks? I could never understand it.
Of course, for a percentage of these women— the lawyers, the corporate assistants, the hotshot financial types— it was a straightforward matter of practicality and comfort versus dress code. The pumps were basically part of a required uniform, even if said pumps spent 90% of their day under a desk. But beyond that slice of the demographic, it just didn’t seem to jibe with our famed addiction to cool, if sometimes cruel, shoes. This was ages before Carrie Bradshaw and Jimmy Choo, but Lord knows the shoe departments of New York’s department stores had never, ever lacked for business. (And don’t even get me started on the shoe stores in Manhattan. A girl could be tempted to sell a kidney…) I remember the shoe mark-down days at Saks as polite but always elbowy events: we were certainly buying those snappy, impractical shoes. And by God, if we weren’t going to wear these shoes on the streets of Manhattan, where were we going to wear them?
It seems to me that the sneakers-and-hose trend in Manhattan was just that, a trend, and has waned considerably since then (even as it grew deeper roots here in bland Boston and Dowdy Washington, DC). Of course you’ll still see many women wearing Nikes with their tasteful business dress, but I like to think that a decent chunk of Manhattan women, in particular (there may be some New York-As-Center-Of-Universe chauvinism here) realized they bought shoes to show them off, and that the fashion parade wasn’t in their office, it was out on the sidewalks.
Each time I see a sneaker commuter I still ask myself, does she think that all her time in transit doesn’t somehow ‘count’, isn’t as much a part of life as every hour spent at a conference table? Does she prefer to get her daytime fashion on with her stodgy boss, rather than with the world at large? I know, this is horrible logic— wearing sneakers hardly means you’re a zombie while wearing them. What can I say, my thinking is skewed by my compulsive shoe hoarding. But I still like the thought, because it makes me remember that all time is created equal, if you take the trouble to treat it as such. And it usually reminds me there’s a favorite pair of shoes I haven’t worn in a while.
