Pandora's Find

To be honest, this may sound totally bizarre, but I’d never actually been a shoe person before I owned Elegant Steps, my own shoe business.  Since going through school and realising I had larger than normal sized feet and when the right time came for me to buy fashion shoes like all my friends, ladies shoes stopped at size 8s and I was bigger than that!   

Cramming my feet in to ill fitting shoes!

I used to cram my feet into ill fitting shoes (much to my mum’s horror especially when she used to pay a fortune having me measured and fitted to wear only Clarks shoes when I was a child).  When I left school and needed to buy shoes for work and events, I bought what fit me...and invariably it was usually something in black!  Taking to buy high heeled shoes from transvestite websites....well I’m sure you can get the picture! 

Some of the men who buy the same shoes as me?

I have recently been helping my parents clear out their loft and I came across a box labelled ‘Jayne's Old Shoes and Boots’.  In anticipation I hurriedly snipped the string on this large box, that I obviously felt was ‘oh so precious’ back in 1993 when I took the time to package these items...what would this Pandora's Box behold?  I may like to add now that the sheer anticipation of lifting the lid on my past almost 20 years later, given my now chosen career path was practically one of the most thrilling things in my life right now....even after opening the box filled with my old graffiti covered school books!   

My graffiti filled school books from 1989!

My mind was racing...what exactly was this box going to behold for me?  What were my tastes like then?  Why were these shoes so important that I decided to keep them?   The anticipation was killing me...why did I wrap them so well too?!  Double knots and tons of sellotape! 

Pandora's box of delights!

The lid slid noisily off and I put it down next to me.   I was sitting crossed legged on the floor of the loft with a lime green pixie boot in one hand and black clunky ‘broken buckled’ shoe boot in the other and this was the first thought that crossed my mind....

”What on earth was I thinking when I bought these shoes?!”

1)   Did I actually wear these shoes? 

2)   I don’t even remember these shoes EVER being in fashion 

3)   Why on earth did I even keep them?    

Boots with a broken buckle ...did I think that it would be like cryostasis for shoes?  Freezing them in time with the hope that when I eventually opened this box 20 or more years later and there would be a cure for ‘bad taste and broken shoes’.  I would wave my magic wand and they would be all better again....or turn into a pair of size 10 ‘Christian Louboutins?’  No such luck!

The morel of this story...?

Well, I suppose it’s that things change....like me, tastes and fashions move on...so, take my advice....

1)      Don’t hoard old crap, even if you think it is for prosperity

2)      Don’t think the shoe girlie has a magic wand

3)      Honestly, bad taste can get better!

4)      We all make mistakes, it is what we learn from them that really matters.

Lots of love Jayne 

(AKA The Shoe Girlie) 

xxx