In My Shoes

 

 

             

     

                      

 

 

I find myself spending ridiculous amounts of time doing google searches for things from my past.  I guess nostalgia comes with age and unlike my parents, I can google up the past.  As with all young women, clothes were very important; I never had anything resembling a clothes budget growing up so I was always out of style.  Summer jobs during my college years allowed me for the first time ever to shop for myself. 

Aspiring to hippie-dom, the place to go was Greenwich Village.  One summer I fell in love with a store with it’s own line of dresses.  I found one on sale made of a gauzy material with huge butterfly sleeves; not very practical, but I loved it!  Because it was sheer, it came with it’s own green slip and it was almost impossible to keep all the straps in line.  But all through college I remember craving a couple of items I could never afford:  a navy pea coat and Fred Braun shoes.  Many years later, I have a pea coat since they’re back in style.  All through college I wore my high school jacket from I had painstakingly removed the orange letters that spelled “Jefferson”.  It was wool navy so it resembled what I really wanted.

The above pictures are of the shoes and the Greenwich Village of my memory.  Two of the shoes shown are ACTUALLY IN A MUSEUM!!.  The sandals are at the METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART!! (Excuse the caps, but I do find it amazing that shoes I wore are IN A MUSEUM).  I actually had a pair of t-straps like those pictures (on sale, of course) but they were not open back.  I never had the sandals or the oxford-types, but it did seem like everyone else did.  The shoes with laces are very rare and sell for ridiculous prices; none are available now—I guess those who had them wore them slap out.

Looking at these pictures creates the same lust I had then; the feeling that my life would definitely change for the better if I just had the right shoes.  There was another hand-crafted shoe store in the Village at that time, Lombardo’s.  I did finally get a pair of their sandals in a similar style and felt somewhat better. 

Somehow I don’t think clothes represent the same thing these days—there are just too many.  Discount stores and inexpensive imitations abound, so everyone can at least pretend.  Styles change so rapidly that no one item can ever really have that stature for long.  Of course, there are always the “in” brands and designer labels, but it just doesn’t seem the same.  I know it meant so much to me because I felt like I was the only one who couldn’t have what everyone else had. 

I’m a long way from desiring things that much and tend to value comfort and quality over fashion at this point in my life.  And honestly, it’s been years since I’ve seen anything that would even come close to a Fred Braun shoe.