I love shoes but I don’t wear them in my house. I never have. Boots muddy from walking the dogs are allowed into the hall but that is as far as they go. There they sit, the proud workwear hoi polloi of shoes, mixing with all manner of ballerina flats; leopard printkitten heels (I bought mine first, Theresa May); 4″ platforms that both Eliza and I swear are really comfortable but secretly we grit our teeth and tough it out the whole time we have them on.
I ascribe this custom to my Indian upbringing. In India, shoes are removed at the threshold of a house, a shop, and especially a temple. If you think about it, this makes complete sense: goodness knows what filth and germs are brought in on the soles of your shoes. Dust, bodily fluids of all sorts, both animal and human; mud, bacteria: all of these are spread scandalously far and wide by shoes. There should be a law against them.
When you arrive as someone’s guest in India, you remove your shoes before stepping into the house and you are invited to wash your hands and feet, though this could be a euphemism for being shown the lavatory, far from obviously situated even in modern Indian dwellings. An important part of the Hindu wedding ceremony for women (it’s still heteronormative: smash the patriarchy) involves placing your foot on a rock as to symbolise being the rock of the family. Just imagine the kind of message doing this in wobbly 4″ Loubie stilettos would convey.
Washing your feet is such a refreshing exercise in a hot and sweaty climate. I’ve taken to doing my feet in the bidet before I go to bed and now can’t really retire at night without doing this, even if my feet have been in cashmere tights all day.
Given all of this logic, I frown very deeply on people who do not remove their shoes before entering my house, although I do make allowances for age and culture. If you come to my house and I say “Oh don’t worry about taking off your shoes!” I’m secretly wishing that you would actually take off your shoes because it takes me an hour and a half to clean my kitchen floor. I only actually say this to people I really like a lot. Goodness knows how much rubbish the dogs bring into the house in their feet but they are excused my approbation because they have feet not shoes, and I love my dogs.
Further, I simply can’t understand people who put on their shoes as soon as they get up and then wear them all day, removing them only after stomping up to their bedroom at night. Why would anyone want to do that? How uncomfortable! When do their feet breathe? I like to wear as few clothes as possible anyway, which is why I always applaud the end of winter, and generally go barefoot at home, made much more tenable by the heating under our dog-friendly slate kitchen floor.
Some, cultures, however, revile bare feet. I had a French friend who found it all very odd and primitive that I removed my shoes on entering a house, that I pad around pieds nus. Or perhaps she found me odd and primitive. We shall never know as we are no longer friends. Let us speak no more of her, she was a disdainful moo.
The memorable episode of Sex in the City, A Woman’s Right to Shoes fills me with complete and utter loathing for Carrie, much as I would love her shoe wardrobe, and I was never much of a fan in the first place. How dare she feel entitled to wear exactly what she likes in someone else’s house, treading in all sorts of New York City muck! The comments under the clip show that, in large part, Carrie’s compatriots seem to take her side, which is just more proof of how alien US culture can feel. I couldn’t find a YouTube clip that illustrates my point rather than their assertions of their Constitutional right to trample into someone else’s territory roughshod or otherwise, and that in itself is telling, so you’ll just have to watch the whole video. Go on, you know you want to.
In Japan, there are special loo shoes that a worn only in the bathroom, so egregious to the Japanese psyche is the combined evil of the lavatory and the shoe.
So next time so you are invited to a Japanese person’s house, make sure that you’re not wearing these leather leggings boots, from Tamara Mellon:
