The internet is rife with fashion influencers. I think? I mostly lost track after fashion blogs disappeared. The only one who came to mind was Jenny Walton, once on my radar as The Sartorialist’s partner but no more (and good riddance, I say, not knowing these people personally). I went to Walton’s Instagram and saw that she is spon-conning the high(er)-end version of some shoes I myself just purchased, albeit under a different influence.
It was a fateful day. Not today, the day I saw The Shoes.
For complicated reasons relating to food allergies (one kid cannot eat certain foods, the other must eat them regularly and in large quantities to prevent any food allergies from developing), my husband and I were each having lunch with a different kid in a different food establishment at the same time. My husband and one kid were one place I won’t name lest they not really be the problem, and I was with the other at a certain Fresca Pizza & Pasta. There is a point to this story.
The different lunches, or rather different lunch locations as it wasn’t food poisoning, were the only explanation we could come up with, timing-wise, for the origin of the great Vomiting Crisis of 2024 that nearly took down our household over the past couple weeks. (I will either be studied for norovirus immunity or will wake up at precisely 1:45am tonight with it. I think I’m out of the zone. I think.) And Fresca, old friend, you are in the clear.
Not only is Fresca Pizza & Pasta, a hole-in-the-wall with Toronto’s best pizza, free of sesame, tree nuts, and norovirus, but in walked a woman with the best shoes I had ever seen. She was in her 50s or 60s, with a same-age man, and looked far too elegant for the likes of Fresca. But she knows what’s what, and that their basil-garlic-oil topping makes the difference. She also had, again, the perfect shoes.
Because I come from a city where it is normal to do such things, I told the woman how great her shoes were. She thanked me and said it had been quite the hunt to find them, they were something she had had long ago, as a kid I think. I asked her if she’d found them locally and she had. She didn’t volunteer where, though, which only added to the mystery.
Not only was it like the Botticelli Seinfeld but the shoes themselves were not dissimilar. Loafers, not oxfords. (This thread is so good, however.)
Did I then promptly go shoe-shopping? I did not. Did I do anything unrelated to immediate deadlines and the children’s clinic? Not so much.
I remember little of what followed, a blur of trying to make sure things on the home front didn’t totally collapse, staying on top of laundry dishes etc., all the while wondering who would be next to require the bowl. All interspersed with what was an unusually busy week work-wise. (Some for stuff to come, some already happened.) Lots of feeling #blessed not to be throwing up myself, yet, at least. There are the websites that helpfully let you know such viruses remain contagious for weeks, months, years, who knows.
So I decided that when things calmed down, I would at the very least try these shoes on, in a store.
Because, you see, you do have to try on shoes. I am not a Luddite, but I find it positively dystopian that online shoe-shopping ever became a thing. I keep re-learning this, ordering shoes online, realizing they are obviously a full size bigger/smaller than is right, but also it is too annoying to return or exchange so these are just my shoes now. (No Zappos in Canada.) I would not do this again! (H&M ballet flats don’t count.) I decided to go full-on full priced and simply to the store and try them on and figure out which fit.
This was going to be—and was!—a relaxing outing. A me-time expedition, with a little work-from-another-location (Eataly coffee bar area) and grocery-shopping (H-Mart) thrown in, and a little extra night-work as compensation. I even had Japanese food for lunch amid a bunch of college students for whom this did not seem to be the event of the century it felt like to me, considering.
It had taken me remarkably little online sleuthing to figure out which store had them (all of them do: Urban Outfitters, Aritzia, shoe stores, department stores…), and was likely to have a selection of sizes. It was thus that I made my way to… Holt Renfrew.
Since moving to Toronto in 2015, I had bought exactly nothing at this store, despite living quite near it for a time, and despite having bought exactly plenty of clothes and accessories in Toronto in the past decade. Holt Renfrew, whomst’s facilities I know from when I was pregnant and once needed to go pee in them, is like if the Bon Marché in Paris were really posh and that tends not to be my scene. I had once looked around there during a sale and everything was ten trillion dollars even discounted so it was like, maybe not.
But these, these are mass-produced loafers, the same yes-higher-than-my-usual but not absurd price wherever they’re sold. They do not morph into Louboutins when in proximity to those. Why not enjoy the luxe experience of trying them on in a palace? A saleswoman waited patiently while I spent longer than one should quibbling between two pairs a half-size apart (the bigger pair won, because socks). They seem like they will require some breaking in, but also like they will singlehandedly (doublefootedly) revamp my entire look, so it’s worth it.
Garbage kid shoes brought me to the same shoe shopping epiphany. After returning yet another pair, I literally thought: “there has to be another way,” and then the memories came flooding back, and to the Dufferin Mall the whole family headed.
I always wanted to dress kind of like Elaine. Well, I probably did. The 90s were full of those fun floral dresses and I looked nice in them! I wholeheartedly agree with the complete absurdity of buying shoes online, and I will add pants to that category. How can anybody buy pants online? I have just done it, because I am going on a hiking trip and I need trekking pants, which are a special thing, and apparently in my city it is illegal to buy trekking pants if you are over a size 10. (Half my friends are into hiking and none of us are a size 10.) So I bought pants online and they were way too big and I had to return them and reorder a different size. The whole thing is preposterous. Anyway, those are pretty great shoes.