fashion 2011: ZOMG, shoes.

This year, a Daily Express study reported that the average woman will spend $25,000 on 469 pairs of shoes in her lifetime. I'm not sure what to make of this, as I don't consider myself much of a shoe fanatic. And that I blame completely on my terror over anything with a heel higher than an inch.

I have always been slightly fascinated and completely fearful of heels. Those perfectly groomed women who saunter along in their four-inch pumps or slingbacks or stilletos or WHATEVER make me feel inadequate and mannish and decidedly unfeminine. I wonder how these creatures manage to stay so balanced, so collected, so elegant tottering along in them. When I wear heels, I have the tendency to walk like a somewhat demented chicken with a head injury. I wobble. I collapse. I collide into furniture. And God forbid I have to climb stairs.

My mother was extremely fond of heels. Every morning I'd watch her finish off her outfit (power shoulder-padded business suit, red lipstick, gigantic gold clip earrings) with a polished pair of pumps. He feet were calloused and slightly crippled from years of heels, and yet she confessed that wearing them was more comfortable for her than flats. She is not the only woman I have heard make this assessment. Personally, I find this...perplexing. In heels, my feet are contorted and arched and bent into remarkable proportions. The balls of my feet bear my weight, which seems to increase by a hundred pounds with every step. My calf muscles are stretch to a limit familiar to gymnasts and ballerinas. I have never been either.

Thankfully, I do not have the professional job or glamorous, jet-setting lifestyle that makes wearing heels necessary. And so I avoid them like the plague. But I do dream about being the kind of confidant, gravity-defying woman who buys them, the kind of woman who attends gallery openings and lives in an all-white apartment decorated with Swedish furniture and nineteenth-century antiques and a lifetime subscription to W Magazine. To this woman, shoes are trophy-like and collectible. She walks into a shoe store and gets those fluttery goosebumps similar to a love-at-first-sight reaction. (Whereas I look in the window of a shoe store and think: "hmm those look like they'd hurt. and those. and those? forget it." And then I move along, to stare open-mouthed at the shiny baubles in the jewelry shop window.) Our glamazon shoe fiend is willing, indeed giddy, to sacrifice her comfort and perhaps her life for heels.

And so, for today, I came a tinier bit closer to being that woman.