Single sole

by maggiealderson

How is your single sole? As opposed to your single soul, which is another conversation entirely and one most perfectly addressed by the film of Bridget Jones Diary.

I will never get over the moment when the lift doors open and there is Hugh Grant at the height of his glory. The first time I saw it a full howl escaped from my throat. About twenty viewings later I’ve just about got it down to a yelp. The boating scene absolutely kills me too.

He is my perfect man in that film. Well, apart from the skinny American woman in the bathroom, but the stiletto sharp intelligence, the throwaway wit, the hair, the unbuttoned shirt, the naughty eyes, he just kills me. He was brilliant in real life too, at the Levison Enquiry, sigh… Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, shoes.

‘Single sole’ is the term marvellous Net-a-Porter has come up with for NON platform shoes. I let out another kind of yelp when I first saw it, captioning a picture of the Jimmy Choo above, in the site’s most excellent on line magazine. Here’s the link.  http://www.net-a-porter.com/magazine#!/179/2

It’s such a funny term and so necessary to make the difference between the two kinds of shoes – being normally soled shoes and the platform monstrosities which have dominated the last few years of footwear. Like these monstosities by Guiseppe Zanotti.

If you’ve been reading me for the last year, you will already know what I thinof platform pumps, particularly the nude pump. I HATE THEM. I hated them on sight, weird mutant woman Mr Tumnus feet. They are like Barbie’s permanent high-heel-ready plastic trotters, but worse.

Even after the entire Royal family, who are the world’s most unstylish people, all wore them to Will and Kate’s nups and Ascot, people who should know better were getting around in them.

I don’t hate platforms entirely. I appreciate extended leg length as much as the next stumpy woman. I loved them in the 1970s, when they were new to teen me and I embraced them enthusiastically again when they first re-appeared in the mid-noughties. I still love these Louboutins – they’re properly camp – it was just that the genre then hung around way too long and started to look cheaper and cheaper, in the pursuit of novelty, even when they were £500 shoes.

I still love a wedge. I can’t wait for summer to roll around so I can get back into those. And I love my brothel creeper ‘flatforms’ too, it’s just the endless Louboutin rip offs, I can’t bear.

It’s probably my age, but if I’m going to spend far more money than is quite moral on shoes, they are going to be Manolo Blahnik. Particularly these two styles, which – alongside a whole new collection every season – he has always done. Any shoe style that can still inspire lust, twenty years after you first saw them has to be a classic.

About these ads