Imelda? I Never!

Monday: Bottega Veneta ponyskin slingbacks

Don’t call me Imelda Marcos.

Not because I’m in denial. I’m not. I know my problem is very real. Someone pointed out recently that although I give away bags full of shoes and clothes to Goodwill at least four times a year, my closet astonishingly never seems to get any less full — as if it were a cornucopia blessed not by Zeus but by some heretofore undiscovered Greek god of footwear. And yet, nor does the closet overfloweth. My theory is that I subconsciously make sure that my shoe count always hovers just below the triple digits, because in my mind crossing that barrier would mean that I really had a problem.

But I digress. The reason I can’t relate to Imelda is that the 1,220 pairs of shoes the former first lady of the Philippines famously left behind when she fled the presidential palace in 1986 were so terribly boring. She herself has admitted (or rather rationalized) that most of them were practical pumps — and indeed I remember seeing footage of the shoe collection, and to my disappointment they were often the same unextraordinary style, just in dozens, no, hundreds of different colors.

And as someone who lives for the thrill of the chase, I just can’t understand that. What’s the joy in just buying the same shoe in a dozen colors at one time? Not that I would likely turn my nose up at a pair of Manolo Blahnik Carolyne slingbacks no matter how many I already have. And not that I don’t own many, many tall black boots. But each pair is unique: purchased at a different store, in a different season, in a different mood. Every shoe, you see, tells a story. Imelda — merely excessive. Me? I believe the word is obsessive.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Shoes, Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.