One of my favorite lines from Sex & the City is when Carrie says to her editor at Vogue (played by Candice Bergen), “Men I may not know, but shoes, shoes I know!” If you know me at all, you know I love shoes. I love buying them, I love looking at them, and I love wearing them. A new pair of shoes makes me feel happy! I may not know shoes as well as Carrie Bradshaw knew them, and I may not buy Manolo Blahniks (although I have tried some on!), but I do know what is in style and, more importantly for me, what I like. The fact is, I don’t go for every fad there is in the shoe world. I never bought Uggs, I thought Crocs were ugly long before Newsweek was writing articles on their horrendousness (not the mary janes of course, but the ones with the holes in them), and I’m not sure I like the current gladiator sandal and Oxford crazes (I prefer my heels to come without laces). That said, I still like my shoes to have some flair to them, like my kitten heels that have measuring tape bows on the toes or my four-inch-heel pumps with hot pink flowers on them. (Unfortunately, I don’t have Carrie’s talent for walking–and running–in four inch heels, so this last pair might spend the rest of their days in my closet.)
I once told my mom that I wanted to design shoes for a living. She pretty quickly pointed out that I know absolutely nothing about what goes into designing shoes. I have been faced with a new dilemma recently, however, that has once again forced me to consider becoming Katie the Shoe Designer (as the politicians would say). As you may know, I now live in Boston. It’s cold in Boston. I’m talking highs-in-the-forties-in-October cold. So obviously I need boots to keep my legs and feet warm. And not cowboy boots like what I would have needed had I stayed in Texas, but sleek boots with pointy toes and stiletto heels and a zipper up the side.
Therein lies the problem. These type of boots are apparently made for women who have tiny little stick legs! I am not a large girl by any means. I’m 5′2″ and I weigh…ok, I’m not going to tell you how much I weigh, but I’m small, dammit! I picked out a pair of very beautiful boots online, fell in love with them, went to the store to try them on and…I hate to say it. My calves were too large. The zipper only made it halfway up my leg. So I went to another shoe store and tried on two more pairs of boots. The same thing happened. At this point, my self-esteem was rapidly sinking, so I was of course forced to buy two pairs of heels in order to feel good about the lower half of my body again.
But the boot search continued. I went to Filene’s Basement with some friends and found, yet again, a wonderful boot. This pair was even worse: the zipper barely made it past my ankle before coming to a halt.
“What’s wrong with my legs??” I asked my friends. They attempted to console me with various explanations: “Shoe companies are crazy.” ”Women are too thin.” ”It’s in proportion to the size of the shoe, so if your foot wasn’t so small, then the calves would fit.” ”It’s because you have muscular legs from running.”
Ok, grants, I do run five miles on my days off, but I’m not sure that’s what makes my calves larger. They don’t seem that muscular to me. Now I just view them as disproportionately fat things. I avoided this whole issue at first by buying slouchy black boots that weren’t so tight, but for my brown boots, I really wanted something dressier. My solution was to use my roommate’s tape measure and measure my calves: fourteen inches. (Please don’t go measuring your calves and leaving comments that brag about how small they are. That means you, Rainey, with your “best legs in Mville”!) Then I went to zappos and piperlime, my two favorite shoe websites (zappos is the best, but its web design and boxes aren’t nearly as aesthetically-pleasing as piperlime’s). For most, if not all, boots listed on these websites, a circumference is given, usually in the 13″ range, although some are marked “wide calves” or something like that. (Sigh…) Using these measurements, I was able to pick out a couple boots in my size, price range, and desired heel height that seemed like they would fit my mammoth calves. Then I looked them up on the designer’s webpage to see if the circumferences given matched. Here’s a tip: they don’t. Zappos had one pair marked as 14 1/2″, while the designer put it as smaller than 14″. I have no idea how they are measuring this, if it really does change based on shoe size and the circumference given is an average (my roommate’s suggestion) or if they just stink at measuring. Anyway, I finally found a pair that was marked as 15″, so I bought them. They came last night, and voila! They didn’t zip up. So what did I do? I plopped down on the floor and pulled the zipper up with one hand while shoving my calves in with the other hand. And eventually I was able to get the zipper all the way up! For a while I was concerned about losing all feeling in my legs below the knee, but my roommate told me that leather stretches (I know, I’m a bad vegetarian), so I have stubbornly decided to keep them and hope that the red imprints on my legs caused by the boots’ stitching will fade with time.
And here’s where my desire to design comes in. My boots, as well as many others out there, have this decorative buckle/belt-type-thing at the top. Why not make it a real belt/buckle so that those of us with real-women-have-curves calves can actually wear these boots?? (Ok, all my curves are located below the waist and apparently not in the designer-friendly areas.) This is such a simple solution that I”m concerned that either no one else’s calves are as large as mine or that shoe designers only want stick-thin women wearing zip-up boots. As much money as I have given to shoe companies in the past, you’d think they’d help me out on this one. Quit making it so hard for me to spend money on your boots!
Oh and now that I have dress boots, I’ve decided that I also need rain boots. Unfortunately, those don’t have big enough circumferences either…I am destined to have cold, chubby, and rain-soaked calves.
Posted by katienapkins 