Brogues for women were fashionable last year. But are they still fashionable this year? More importantly, do they actually look good?
Madeleine, London
So many issues, so little time, such clumpy shoes. I shall tackle each of your issues in turn, Madeleine. So, as you wisely observe, brogues were indeed fashionable last year, providing succour for women who longed for a flat shoe that wasn't a ballet slipper, but breaking the hearts of hipster women who were horrified that their footwear of choice had gone mainstream.
Women with legs like twigs and images of Alexa Chung dancing through their gamine heads beneath their thick choppy fringe wore their brogues with tights and short dresses. Women who take their style inspiration from Annie Hall as opposed to Twiggy paired theirs with trousers. And the rest of us sulkily stomped around and shivered in our rain-sodden ballet slippers.
Now, the shoe industry ain't no fool industry and they, like you, Madeleine, have been casting around for a new flat shoe to – as Will Ferrell says in Blades of Glory – get the people going, or at least get the women shopping and keeping them ambulatory. Yes, brogues may have worked last autumn, but obviously a new flat shoe must be found for this year in order to persuade women to spend more money. Like, duh! And the shoe that industry types have decided upon for autumn/winter 2012 is – as anyone who has picked up a fashion magazine in the past three months knows – slippers. Not actual slippers, of course, but shoes mocked up to look like posh old man's slippers, of the sort that I imagine Sesame Street's Alistair Cookie would wear on his feet (if Muppets had feet), replete with velvet and dinky tassels. Unfortunately, as I have noticed and as you have noticed and as the shoe people have definitely noticed, there aren't quite as many women around who want to look like Alistair Cookie as there who want to look like Alexa Chung. I have yet to see anyone wearing a "day slipper" outside the pages of a magazine. It's like that scene in Mean Girls when Rachel McAdams has to reprimand her co-meanie who is trying to make "fetch" a new trendy word: "Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen!" Rachel cries in exasperation. Magazines, stop trying to make slippers happen. The people don't want to look like Vincent Price.
So, the brogue has hung on in there for this year and there is no fashion shame in wearing one. And there is good sense in this: it's a sturdy shoe that keeps a gal's feet warm, dry in the rain and, most importantly, keeps her mobile and upright.
But choose with caution, ladies, choose with caution. Not all brogues are created equal. Personally, I am not abrogue person, but even I can see that a nice slim-cut brown brogue, adapted ever so slightly for women, and without that ugly colour fade-out on the toe that so many men's shoes have for no obvious reason, is a fine and useful thing. Worn with a knee-length straight skirt or dress, or under a pair of trousers – marvellous. A chunky one, though, will just make you look like a three-year-old child playing dressup in your father's closet, ladies, and a two-tone effect makes you look as if you're paying homage to Cab Calloway, and not really in a good way.
But there is another issue to consider here, my fellow womenfolk, when it comes to brogues, and it has nothing to do with aesthetics. What about the men? Men, as we have discussed many, many times here before, have only so many safe items of clothing for themselves, and these are being seized by us, us greedy ladies, in daily landgrabs. Boyfriend jeans, tartan button-down shirts – we're like Britain in the days of the empire, heartlessly snatching any random bit of beauty for ourselves and fashioning it to our image.
Now, I like to play with gender fashion codes as much as the next fan of British fashion but let us ask ourselves, women, when will it end? Are we leaving men with nothing for themselves so they must wander the streets buck-naked? Are we so bereft of our own fashion ideas we have to nick theirs? And most of all, does this mean one day I'll be having to explain why the big fashion trend for women this year is wearing one's jeans down around one's thighs?
You see brogues, Madeleine; I see a gateway drug. Walk in those brogues by all means, but walk with caution.
