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Designer
Marc Jacobs calls this his "misplaced heel
shoe."
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There’s no shortage of childhood traumas. These
little mini-dramas of humiliation are the very backbone
of who we are.
Sure, we can laugh now but at the time it didn’t
seem all that funny - not if you were the kid who came
to kindergarten with her shoes on the wrong feet.
It happens.
Your mom is yelling at you to hurry up: ‘‘Get
dressed or you’ll be late for school.’’
Seriously, sometimes it’s just not that easy to
tell your left foot from your right. So you jam the
wrong feet into your shoes, slap the Velcro straps and
you’re good to go.
Good, that is, until that uh-oh classroom moment when
some little know-it-all starts pointing and laughing.
So maybe you weren’t that kid with the shoes on the
wrong feet. How about the grade-schooler ridiculed by
the others for your offbeat fashion choices?
You mixed plaids and stripes. You wore your winter
boots until June, just because you liked the way they
looked. You hated pink.
For all those little girls, this shoe is for you.
Fashion is catching up with those whose ‘‘different’’
choices didn’t make the grade in primary school.
For obvious reasons, designer Marc Jacobs calls this
his ‘‘misplaced heel shoe’’ (marcjacobs.com,
$596).
If you’re looking for artistic precedent, recall
Pablo Picasso’s Cubist portrayals of women whose body
parts he rearranged and put in places nature never
intended.
Flash that little piece of art history at those
meanies who made sport of your wardrobe choices a few
decades ago.
The hues of this fashion forward footwear are not
your traditional go-together colors-and decidedly not
Barbie pink. So much for those who accused you of not
matching. That wasn’t clashing, it was cutting edge.
Even the feel of this thoroughly modern footwear
offers a childhood twinge. Walk a few steps in these
shoes and you’re a little unsettled, slightly bouncy.
You’re back on the playground now, remembering the
teeter-totter. n
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-In the mid-1500s, a shoe style called ‘‘chopines’’
was popular among women in Italy, Spain and France.
Chopines had pedestals of cork or wood as tall as 24
inches and thick soles designed to protect the foot from
wet or muddy streets.
-The average North American woman has 30 pairs of
shoes in her closet. Most women tend to buy about six
new pairs per year.
Sources: metmuseum.org; cbc.ca