Crippling Fashion

I can’t believe it’s happening so soon.  That thing I swore wouldn’t happen to me, well it’s happening already. It must be my age...I’ve started looking at what young people wear and asking myself; “what the hell are you wearing?”

I was in the outdoor cafe in Richmond Park the other day and I could see a wedding reception being held in a sectioned off area. It’s a beautiful location with a great view so unsurprisingly it’s popular for weddings. Although sectioned off, the guests are still very much in view to the general public.

There’s something intriguing about seeing guests arriving at a wedding and clearly the rest of the cafe were enjoying the relaxing art of ‘people watching’. The guests at this particular reception clearly had money.  Money yes, grace and style...err, no.

It was a warm day so fake tan and skimpy dresses were everywhere. They all seemed excited about the big event. Then a car pulled up and out got a very beautiful girl.  She was helped out of the car by what I assume was her gallant husband and she started walking across the car park towards the venue.

I immediately took pity on the poor girl; I could only see her head and shoulders but from the way she was walking she looked as though she was recovering from a bad accident that had rendered her without the use of her legs for a while. I naturally assumed the poor thing was still undergoing intense physiotherapy as she gradually learnt how to walk again.

“Good for you girl” I heard myself say, I admired her pluck amongst all the glamour pusses. However when she cleared the car park and came into the open the full horror of her ailment became clear.  She wasn’t in fact wearing callipers or correction shoes or anything of that nature.  Her hobbling gait was completely self- inflicted by the most ridiculous high heels I’ve ever seen.  She presented such an obscene spectacle that everyone in the cafe stared at her as she painfully walked by. She had all the grace of someone walking barefoot on a pebble beach.

Initially I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt; there’s always one who doesn’t quite get the whole fashion thing and takes it too far but then even more girls showed up wearing exactly the same heels.  They were all hobbling along with their expensive dresses and their fake tans, it was quite a sight.

For the record I’m not one of those men that likes women to look like they belong to the Amish sect; I love to see a woman in high heels; they’re as sexy as hell.  But surely the point of high heels is for the wearer to look and feel sexy, beautiful, graceful or elegant; take your pick from any of those.  These things make women look anything but.

What I don’t understand is before they left their homes’, they must have looked in the mirror and thought they looked great. How could they have missed such a massive flaw in their appearance? These girls were obviously under immense peer pressure.  

As a society, how have we arrived at such a ridiculous state of affairs, where young attractive women will wear something that forces them to walk like cripples just to fit in? Why did none of them question the fact they could barely walk, never mind how fashionable these shoes are.

The designers of these shoes appear to be missing something.  When they first trial them on the catwalks around the world even the models fall over and they are people who walk up and down for a living; they’re paid to do it, they’re professionals.  You’d imagine they would be experts at walking and yet even they can’t work out how to walk normally in them.  And yet still these shoes go into production, do the shoe designers not care about the people who are going to buy their products?

I know a lot of women have a ‘thing’ for shoes but isn’t this entering into ‘emperor’s new clothes’ territory?