Opinion

Anita Robinson: As a lover of shoes I must draw the line at trainers

Trainers: strictly for exercise 
Trainers: strictly for exercise  Trainers: strictly for exercise 

I write more in sorrow than in anger. Daughter Dear, tenderly tutored from her earliest years in the aesthetics of footwear, has chosen to spend her birthday money on TRAINERS – rose gold sequinned trainers.

My heart is riven. I’m torn between disinheriting or disowning her. Probably both.

I deplore the current proliferation of trainers, a species of footwear originally designed for sporting activities, any form of which I have never felt the slightest inclination to participate in. They are an aberration, an abomination, irredeemably yew-gee-ell-wy UGLY, making the wearer (if female) look like Minnie Mouse or Florence from the Magic Roundabout.

But they’re COMFORTABLE you may protest. Comfort? Don’t bleat to me about comfort. Trail about the house in down-at-heel slippers if you will, but don’t inflict them on the public gaze.

Trainers, (the clue’s in the name,) designed for the practice of energetic pursuits are currently being worn as a fashion statement by people who wouldn’t run for a bus, but have fallen victim to fashion’s ubiquitous diktat that it’s ‘cool’ to team them with everything, including formal wear and weddings. Trust me, they’ll look back on the photographs and cringe.

I’m staring at a picture of the Times fashion editor looking as if dressed by a committee in the dark, in a dowdy-looking mid-calf length skirt, (another style aberration,) big white trainers and an inscrutable expression. She delivers herself of truism though. “Designers,” she says, “have to sell us what we want before we want it. They need to tweak that object of desire just enough to make us buy it all over again.” See? Women fall for it every time. Myself included – though I draw a very firm line at big clootery trainers like twin paddle-steamers churning up the Mississippi.

I’ve had a love affair with footwear from infancy. My first memory is a pair of white buckskin booties. I was two. Then there were the yellow shoes from America when I was five. I slept with them under my pillow and squeezed my feet into them when they were long outgrown. School shoes and a sensible mother were a combined penance to be endured. My first stilettos at seventeen set me on the road to adulthood, walking like Dick Emery in drag, but I’ve never looked back.

Aaah – the empowerment of heels! I have always aspired to higher things. It comes, in the first place, of being only five feet three-and-a-half inches tall. Heels physically increase height, slim ankles, mould calves, make one look thinner. Also, they inspire confidence, help one psychologically rise to the challenge, feel that one’s ‘in charge’. I’m proud to say that for 35 years I taught small children in high heels (me, not the children.) Even the plainest of them (the shoes, not the children,) are beautiful in themselves, things of sculpted elegance and grace. Personally, any enterprise I’ve ever undertaken in the dire necessity of flat shoes has been a dismal failure.

Fashion looks are notorious for being transient as a summer shower. Just as I’ve acquired a nice little collection of mid-height block heels, the Guardian’s ‘style measure’ informs me they’re already passé and the next big thing is the ‘needle heel’. Since fashion’s eternally revolving carousel comes round approximately every ten years, I remain unfazed. By happy chance, I have, stored in the roof space, three black binliners full of three decades worth of shoes, so I’m several steps ahead of the zeitgeist. Keep a thing long enough and it’ll always come back. Conveniently, ‘vintage’ is enjoying a style renaissance. The shoes range in size from 4 ½ to 6 and at one stage or another they all fitted. I use the term ‘fitted’ loosely – or in some cases tightly. The late Loving Spouse used to say to Daughter Dear, “Take your mother’s arm – she’s bad on her feet.”

There may be a time, a place, an excuse for wearing trainers, but not in my life. When it comes to trainers, I flatter myself that I occupy the moral high ground.