Heart and Sole: The Shoes of My Life

by Jane Eldershaw

Overview

"There are only two kinds of women in the world, those who love shoes and those who had the misfortune to be born without the ability to experience total bliss on finding a pair of perfectly designed pumps in the right size at half price."

Heart and Sole is a lighthearted illustrated memoir, full of wisdom and humor, of one woman's life through her shoes. Jane Eldershaw remembers the shoes she has loved, the ones that turned out to be terrible mistakes, and the important life lessons she learned along the way. She writes about her first pair of heels (and the battle she had with her mother to get them), the white go-go boots and wooden platform shoes of her youth, and the power of red shoes, as well as how to judge a man by his shoes and the importance of girlfriends when shopping for footwear.
Heart and Sole dishes out shoe advice, fashion memories, and warmhearted observations on the shoes of our lives. The perfect gift for every shoe diva and footwear lover.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466863286
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/28/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jane Eldershaw is a writer and magazine illustrator. Born in Australia, she has worked for many magazines and newspapers, including the New Woman magazine and Vogue Australia.

Jane Eldershaw is a writer and magazine illustrator. She is the author of Heart and Sole. Born in Australia, she has worked for many magazines and newspapers, including the New Woman magazine and Vogue Australia.

Read an Excerpt

Heart and Sole

The Shoes of My Life

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By Jane Eldershaw

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2004 Jane Eldershaw
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6328-6

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CHAPTER 1

THE IMELDAS: GIRLFRIENDS WHO LOVE SHOES

Bonding via Shoes

There are only two kinds of women in the world. Those who love shoes and those who had the misfortune to be born without the ability to experience total bliss on finding a pair of perfectly designed pumps in the right size at half price. There's a direct correlation: the more shoes a woman owns, the nicer person she turns out to be. The more she obsesses about footwear, the more normal she becomes.

Those of us who love shoes are happy, passionate, exuberant people. Whenever we meet, we recognize each other with our own special greeting, the shoe-aholic's hello: "Ooooh," we say. "Cute shoes."

I call them the Imeldas, the friends I go shoe-shopping with, named in honor of the patron saint of footwear, Imelda Marcos, with her three-thousand-pair wardrobe.

Calling it simply shopping, though, is an understatement. Shopping implies an efficient task completed, a quick commercial transaction, a mere exchange of money for goods. What we do is a sort of moving meditation with stream-of-consciousness voice-over, a multitasking way of bonding. Quality time. We case our favorite stores, catch up on each other's news, sound out each other's opinions, and pursue our personal quest for the perfect comfort-to-style-ratio heel, all at the same time. We roam freely, pausing whenever a shoe catches our eye, exploring every delight each store has to offer. All our senses are satisfied: we finger taffeta slides, inhale the fragrance of new leather, test-drive four-inch stilettos, gossip outrageously.

It's not just shopping. It's also relaxing, stimulating, and productive — a hobby and a necessity and a pleasure all in one.

And it's practical to shop à deux. Step into a pair of lace-up reptile demi-boots, and you try on a whole new personality. But is it one you will be able to live with? Is this true lust or just fashion-victim myopia? An Imelda will tell you.

Or you fall in love with a pair of two-tone wingtips, but are not entirely sure it's a look you can pull off — a biased opinion is standing right next to you at the full-length mirror. There is empowerment in the buddy system. If you've lost all sense of perspective when it comes to open-toed wedgies, an Imelda will help you just say no. And you can't beat an Imelda for a quick, efficient, all-purpose, on-the-spot rationalization: You're actually saving money in the end. You'll wear them forever. They'll go with everything. You definitely need both pairs.

You tap into years of vital shoe experience when you shop with an Imelda. (I used to have a pair of mushroom-colored suede flats like this. Biggest mistake of my life. First time I wore them, they were ruined by fragrance-spray fallout.) You learn that slides are not made for journeys of longer than two blocks, that navy-dyed pumps worn without hose can leave your toes looking bruised, that some stores will let you return virgin, unscuffed shoe mistakes.

Sometimes one of us is in the grip of a powerful urge to spend a lot of money we don't actually have. If my credit cards are maxed out (Don't let me a buy a single thing today!), looking at shoes is a way of cruising the malls without getting hurt. I can rely on an Imelda to talk me down from a fatal attraction.

Sometimes we are miserable, shoe-browsing to alleviate the pain of a broken heart, and mostly content to just walk and talk, but maybe making a few Prozac purchases — Kiwi polish, shoe trees — to get back into the swing of things.

Sometimes we go to discount stores, poverty-stricken spendthrifts, and acquire multiple pairs of brightly colored plastic sandals. Buying too much too cheaply — it's the shopper equivalent of overdosing on sugar. We spend money, we get silly and excitable — it's more cathartic than chocolate.

Sometimes there are three of us. We move through department stores, a tangle of girls all talking at once, drawn by anything bright and colorful. We gravitate to Designer Shoes, reaffirming our taste for ultra-skinny straps, squealing over red satin lining, plucking a pump from its pedestal, turning it over to check its pedigree, making our way, guided by some infallible inner radar, to the sales racks, instantly on heightened alert for our own particular size.

All morning we claim we don't need rest, food, or water, just shoes, until we all get ravenous at the same time and tell ourselves that lunch will give us a chance to decide about the thigh-high pink python boots, whether they're a have-to-have we can't live without — or whether, come to think of it, what we really, truly need are the leopard-skin elf booties.

Shoes, we agree, are the most satisfactory way to spend money: more gratifyingly public than lingerie, bigger and more show-offy than jewelry, friendlier, and cozier than the cold metal of technology.

Shoes are not mere accessories. Shoes are the meaning of life.

CHAPTER 2

DÉJÀ SHOE ALL OVER AGAIN

First Steps for Little Folk

There once existed a shaky eight-millimeter home movie, crackling with static, of me staggering about in my first shoes, out in the backyard of our suburban bungalow.

The voice-over is Dad: "Hold it steady, Betty, damn it," he says as the garden lurches toward the camera and then tilts to show him — still dark-haired, boyish even — making frantic hand motions: "No, no ... Stop that! Not me. Goddamn it, Betty, turn the thing off, you're wasting film." But Mom swings back to zoom in on Baby Jane, alone on a vast stretch of lawn, yet to master the art of walking in a straight line.

I look down at my own feet, entranced ... so busy focusing on my new, white, calf T-straps that I almost fall over. They have tiny ventilation holes in decorative patterns, and my feet are so small that the shoes are almost round — snub-nosed and chubby, cute as a teddy bear.

And, in fact, when we were tiny tots, shoes were like toys, toys that adults put on our feet. My favorite were a pair of bunny slippers: little pink, woolen sockettes with embroidered noses and white ears and buttons for eyes — hand-knitted, haute couture courtesy of Grandmama. And galoshes made satisfying loud thumps clumping through the house. (Hear that? It's me! I can make noise! I exist!) Ballet slippers (plus a tiara and a pink net tutu and fairy wings covered in sparkly rhinestones) were a perfectly splendid choice for a trip to the supermarket.

And if shoes were toys, buying new ones was a fine game. Remember stepping onto those measuring things, feeling the cold metal through your socks, the slider defining the limits of your footprint on the world? The clerk would return with a whole armload of possibilities — gift boxes! She and your mother were wholly focused on you, asking what you liked, which you wanted, were they comfy? Competent fingers buttoned mary janes, adjusted buckles, pulled shoelaces snug. The saleslady's thumb would press down to feel how much space there was between your toe and the end of the shoe as she made little whispered asides to your mother: "Room to grow ... very popular this season ... reliable brand name. Walk 'round, sweetheart. How do they feel?" Your comfort was anxiously attended to, you were queen for a day, Cinderella, a princess with servants.

Everything is fine until we start caring what other people think.

That's when the Dark Ages in my life as a shoe diva began. It was not until my teens that footwear became something to love, honor, and accumulate. Between the ages of six and twelve, I was a hidebound traditionalist, desperate to fit in at school and fanatical about looking exactly like everyone else.

Once, halfway to grade school, I realized, with horror, that I still had bedroom slippers on, rather than the regulation oxford brogues that were part of a strictly enforced school uniform. Not properly dressed! For the first time, clothing caused sharp embarrassment, and shoes let me down. I became fallible, human, unsure. Outfit anxiety! It was the beginning of growing insecurities, the end of innocence.

The carefree part of my childhood was over. Adults were trying to fill the large empty spaces in my brain — the spaces that would later be filled with images of shoe styles — with things like mental arithmetic. And it was about this time that my grade school teacher took to announcing our daily song to the class by saying: Now we will all sing and Jane will hum.

I'd been a happy only child. Now the world was suddenly overrun with teasing schoolmates and demanding teachers. I tried to gain control over the few things I could: I insisted on footwear identical to that of everyone else, insisted that replacement pairs look exactly the same as those I'd worn previously.

During those lost years, the main part of my shoe wardrobe contained only two kinds of shoes: one pair of brown lace-up brogues, for school, and one pair of Good Shoes, black patent leather flats that we called court shoes, for parties and outings. The court shoes had a flattened grosgrain bow glued on the instep, and I always wore them with white cotton socks neatly folded over at the ankle, just the way everyone else did.

Luckily these lean years did not scar me for life. I am proud to say that I was able to triumph over the fear of exerting my individuality and later developed a keen appreciation for a beautifully sculpted heel, an abiding love of exotic leathers, and an eagle eye for a pump that is both flattering and unusual. In fact, some friends speculate that the tragic ugly-school-shoe trauma was perhaps the defining experience of my childhood, that it actually led me to become the adroit shoe shopper, the dedicated collector, and the single-minded footwear fanatic I am today.

But I prefer to think that my driving motivation comes from those early happy memories of tottering along on the lawn, that original delight in shoes as playthings. Whenever I see very young children trying on new footwear, a three-year-old, say, on an adult-size chair with feet sticking straight out, waggling his ankles, admiring his new T-straps or jellies or sneakers, I replay in my mind the unsteady baby footsteps of wonder captured in that home movie, and I remember new-shoe joy all over again.

CHAPTER 3

MY FAMILY SHOE TREE: A TALE OF TWO CLOSETS

Fitting In vs. Standing Out

Fifty-six pairs, all in their original boxes — that was my mother's personal best. Each box labeled with black laundry marker: large, careful capitals spelling out OXFORDS, black and white; OXFORDS, navy and white; OXFORDS, tan and white, a lifetime's supply of shoes carefully laid down in their own closet like fine wine. My father said shoes were her way of making up for being a middle child.

But it was more than that. Footwear was Mother's chosen method of representing Quality. Good Shoes demonstrated, even more reliably than pearls or twinsets, essential attributes such as Quiet Elegance and Refined Breeding. Good Shoes showed, in a genteel, understated way, that you Knew What Was What. When my mother talked about shoes, she used phrases like impeccable style, quality leather, and classic lines — as if the sleek thoroughbreds she wore on her feet (Ferragamo, Delman, Bally) had pedigrees and heritage and provenance, as if they strode through a world of antiques, racehorses, and ancient lineage, rather than one of PTA meetings, supermarket checkout lines, and chauffeuring the kids.

The Ferragamo-appreciation gene had been passed on to her from my grandmother, who smelled of clean cotton handkerchiefs and Coty face powder and, when I was very young, instructed me never to tell a man that my feet hurt. "It sounds so vulgar," she told me. "Instead, say, 'My foot hurts.' Much classier."

The flip side of my shoe education was Aunt Doris. If my mother's shoes were her personal walking advertisement of refinement, my father's sister (from the "my feet hurt" side of the family) considered shoes a badge of freedom. She'd grown up during the Depression, when even the ugliest, most utilitarian new shoes were an outrageous indulgence. As a teenager, she'd had to endure chunky, practical wartime clodhoppers: sturdy brown lace-up brogues and hand-me-down winter boots. As soon as she could afford it, her footwear philosophy became, The sexier, the better.

My mother owned sensible loafers, genteel spectators, and demure flats. My aunt owned ankle-strap toe-peeper wedgies, high-heeled marabou scuffs, and snakeskin spikes.

Mom's shoes had smooth, dull textures and colors like tan, taupe, cordovan, navy, and luggage. Aunt Doris had good-time girl stilettos covered in Thai silk dyed a glorious shade of Schiaparelli pink, red high-heeled slingbacks with gold heels, fabric-covered platforms in loud flower prints.

My mother's shoes whispered quiet good taste; my aunt's shoes shouted "Wheee!"

Guess which closet was most fun to burrow through? Aunt Doris let me play dress-up in her wardrobe, and I became an instant princess in gold mules or pink satin slides. At Aunt Doris's place I didn't drag out coloring pencils or picture books; instead I'd find a pair of her fourinch dyed-blue ostrich spikes, climb aboard, and totter in to where the adults were to hear the shoes' story.

My aunt would smile when she saw what I had on. "Those are my favorites."

"My God," my mother would say. "Stilettos! I can't walk in them. They say Marilyn Monroe always has one heel of her stilettos cut shorter than the other, so she'll walk sexy. I don't believe it. It's hard enough to walk in them anyway."

Aunt Doris nodded. "Street gratings. My heels always get caught. And they ruin everything ... carpets, linoleum — Jack won't let me near the parquet. But gee, aren't they gorgeous?"

Even more luxurious, it seemed to me in those early Barbie doll days, was Aunt Doris's enduring edict that shoes must always go with your handbag.

"Everything matchy-matchy — that's my rule. I've owned some real neat outfits in my time," she told me. "I used to have the smartest shantung sheath — Lord & Taylor — that went with those blue stilettos. And a matching pillbox hat. And gloves, blue suede."

Both women had about the same number of shoes, but my aunt's purchases spanned a longer time period. Aunt Doris kept shoes she hadn't worn for thirty years — no way would she ever throw out her favorites, mementos of good times that stretched back for decades. She still had the candy-colored cocktail-party mules and the cork-soled poolside-barbecue sandals she wore through the fifties, the beaded ballerinas she danced the Twist in during the sixties, the sexy platforms that took her discoing in the seventies. Every size six was a souvenir of life lived to the fullest.

My mother, meanwhile, discarded shoes the moment they looked the slightest bit crestfallen and replaced them with yet more trustworthy, long-distance-performing, almond-toe, chunky, mid-heel pumps.

My closet reflects those dual shoe roots. Half of me is a quiet, shy good girl; the other half is a demonstrative show-off. Half of me has classic, conservative good taste; the other half loves funny, outrageous, eye-catching styles. Half my shoe purchases are enduring perennials; the other half are one-summer wonders, footwear fads, and flash. I waver between wanting to fit in and trying to stand out. Between frumpy and fabulous, dowdy and divine.

Most days I follow in my mom's footsteps. The usual me wears demure pumps in real leather with medium heels. But when I want to do hard-core glamour, I know which relative inspires me.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Heart and Sole by Jane Eldershaw. Copyright © 2004 Jane Eldershaw. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Acknowledgments,
Epigraph,
The Imeldas: Girlfriends Who Love Shoes,
Déjà Shoe All Over Again,
My Family Shoe Tree: A Tale of Two Closets,
Finding a Shoe-Inn for Storage,
The Feng-Shoe-Y of Bridesmaid Footwear,
Training Heels,
White Go-Go Boots, Dark Nights,
Sex and the Shoe,
Platforms: The Musical,
An Italian Interlude,
A Guy's Sole: Clues from the Shoes,
The Magic of Red Shoes,
Bows on Everything,
Footwear Follies,
Best Foot Forward,
Men Vs. Shoes,
Flip-Flopping about Pedicures,
Dumping Loved Ones,
Foot Fashion or Foot Assassin?,
Time Slides By,
Copyright,