have some damn class

When I was a little girl, a family moved in a few houses down and the daughter and I became fast friends. One Halloween, we dressed up glamorously from our dress-up chests and handed out candy at my front door in too big high heels, boas, and costume jewelry. The shoes my little friend was wearing were given to her by her aunt to play in and the heel tips had worn off, leaving the slender metal stems. (She was told that these were special tap dancing shoes.) There are still little indentations in the hardwood floor from her stomping up and down the hallway. She was a child and didn’t know better. Adults have no excuse.

Stilettos are the worst. That tiny surface suffers the brunt of your weight pounding against pavement. You usually have some warning though. If you have a favorite pair that you walk long distances in on a regular basis, you will begin to see the metal shaft showing through. This is the time to take your heels to a shoe repair shop… not when it completely falls off and ends up damaging the rest of the heel. It can cost anywhere from, $5-$10 to add new heel tips to your beloved shoes. The shop will usually give them a good polish to get your shoes looking like new before they hand them back to you. It takes less than 10 minutes.

I’m a huge fan of burlesque queen Dita Von Teese and when she went down in the annals of crotch shot history, the first thing I noticed were her busted Louboutins, not her g-string.

This infuriates me! First off, these shoes cost hundreds of dollars, which is probably pocket change to Ms. Teese. (All the more reason to at least have them replaced if not repaired.) I’m sure she’s a very busy woman and doesn’t have time to think about such things but; she has paid assistants! This is also certainly not the only pair of black dress shoes that she owns so why not another option? Why didn’t someone take care of these shoes! They are ruined now. Not only has the sole worn down but, the platform and surrounding leather has been damaged. This could’ve been prevented.  

I bought a pair of strappy patent platforms of a similar style a few years ago and found that with regular wear, the tips of platform shoes are prone to such damage. Before the leather was about to get mangled, I rushed them to my trusty shoe repair man and asked what could be done. He cut the existing sole right where it begins to angle upward and replaced it with an even more durable sole. For $15 my shoes were saved. I would rather be sitting with my legs crossed and have a bit of a mismatched sole showing than a destroyed trashy shoe.

Money obviously cannot buy class.

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Tagged as: fashion, shoes