Putting It All Together: Let's Talk About Shoes

If there is one thing I have learned in my tenure as a blogger, it's this: never put a picture of your shoes on Flickr. Well, let me rephrase that a little: never put a picture of your shoes on Flickr without expecting some weirdo to favorite them. But that wasn't a weirdo! you're saying, that was me! Trust me, it wasn't you. It was some fortysomething dude who lives in his mother's basement and gets his kicks---the kicks he doesn't get when he's winning online role-playing games and stroking his scrawny mustache, that is---scrolling through pictures of manicured toes in mules and Manolos and maryjanes on the Internet. There are serious shoe fetishists living inside your computer, is what I'm saying. Never, whatever you do, put up a picture of your new Wellington boots. You will not believe what comes crawling out of the woodwork when you do. 

After that introduction, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that I like shoes. Who doesn't, right? Shoes are awesome. I myself have many pairs of shoes, and I am willing to bet that you have many pairs of shoes as well. The best kind of shoes, I have discovered, are gold shoes. You kind of can't go wrong with gold shoes: they go with everything. The shoes that I wear more than any others, in fact, are these cheap gold quilted flats I got at Payless a million years ago: they're super comfy, super durable, and you cannot find an outfit with which they do not look a million bucks. I mean, maybe a wetsuit, I guess. That might be weird.

For my wedding last September, I wanted turquoise shoes. Don't ask me why, I just knew I wanted them. I wanted to pull up the hem of my big white dress and have a pair of turquoise shoes peeping out from under there, and such was my mad desire for turquoise shoes on my wedding day, that I ended up with two pairs of turquoise shoes, which is a bit of a conundrum if ever there were one. You've heard of two-dress brides, right? Well, I was a two-pairs-of-shoes bride. Not because I wanted it that way, you understand, but because I'm wholly and horribly indecisive.

First of all, I had these, which I'd bought online, dyed turquoise, and then DIY-accessorized with little white flower hairclips from H&M:

And then a couple of weeks before the wedding, I'd found these on super-sale in Nine West, and they were so comfortable (and so turquoise) that I bought them too:

I was only going to wear the comfortable Nine West ones for the ceremony---lots of standing, you see---and then change into the fancier first pair for the rest of the night, but as is the case with weddings, you have about seven trillion other things on your mind on the day itself, and I ended up not wearing the first pair at all, which means it was the strappy Nine West pair that made it into all of the pictures:

That's sort of a stupid thing to mourn, I know, so maybe the less said about that the better.

Still, I do still have the first pair sitting in my closet---now devoid of the flower hairclips, unfortunately, which got lost somewhere along the way---and every week I pull them out and think "I should wear these with...." and then that's where that thought ends, because I should wear them with what? With my big white lacy wedding dress? I mean, that's kind of all they go with. They're beautiful, though, and I don't think I'll ever be able to bring myself to get rid of them. They remind me of everything I loved about my wedding: how everything that meant anything was something we'd made ourselves.

Next month's Putting It All Together video is going to be about---you guessed it---shoes, and your host Susan will be pulling from the comments on this post (and from all the Putting It All Together posts this week) when she's planning the content for it. And so I'd like to know from you, dear Internet, if you've ever felt about a pair of shoes the way I feel about my wedding shoes. Have you ever been, ahem, emotionally attached? Show me your closet and tell me your story. I promise I won't turn into some sort of weirdo who favorites all the Flickr pictures of your feet.