“Man-made leather” is not leather. It has very little to do with man, or any real “making” as we understand the word. It is not pleather; it is not vinyl; it is not plastic, or a polymer. Most importantly, it is not your friend. It can never become your friend. At most, it can become like a wary feral cat that consents to come up to the back door and eat from a tin of Fancy Feast, but skitters away, tail fattened when you get close; that’s the best you will ever do with man-made leather. You know the expression about how we aren’t meant to know some things? Coined by a woman on her lunch break in the local Payless, holding up a clog and staring at it suspiciously. You can live alongside man-made leather, but its mysteries aren’t yours to understand.

When you try on a go-go boot and you’ve got motion in the ball of the foot — a little diagonal wiggle that lulls you into believing that old shoe-salesman trope about having “enough room in the toe” — it doesn’t fit right, and it will torture you for all of your days on earth, and you will consent to the torture because you paid so much for the boots, and you paid so much for the boots because you thought you had enough room in the toe. Every time you wear them, you will develop a blood blister on the ball of your foot, centered right where the bones of your big toe and second toe come together, and it will pop inwards first, and then it will pop outwards, and your expensive, torturous, misleading boot will fill up with blood and mystery blister gunk, and you will spend the next four days walking on your heel like a gimp and wearing New Balance kicks with a suit skirt. No good. A go-go boot should sit along your arch quietly — no motion. It shouldn’t move along the ball of your foot when you walk — no motion. No wiggle. Nothing. Wiggling? Don’t buy ’em. Scootching? Don’t buy ’em. Sliding? Don’t buy ’em. Torture. Blood blister. Hypochondriac fears of gangrene that you will admit to no one, but which will make you cry alone at night as you wait for discoloration and amputation and death because you are a big baby. Trust me.

Don’t wear wood-bottomed shoes when you go out drinking. See, with any other shoe bottom, you have give, so you put your foot down wrong, but you just teeter a little bit on the edge and the edge will save you. A wood-bottomed shoe has no give, and you will go over like a giant sequoia, complete with the howling scream a sequoia makes when it’s going down and possibly lurching into a row of bar stools on your way to the ground and knocking them over like human/alcohol dominoes. Wood-bottomed shoes look great, but you have no room for error. Wear only when sober.

Shoes might feel like they fit when they run out of your size and you go down a half size, but they don’t. You will wind up with an ingrown toenail, or you will spend every minute you wear them obsessing that your heel is slopping over the back like a little belly, or that your toes are, or that the top of your foot looks like a pig hoof, and if they get wet? Forget it. Not worth it.

Over 25? Leave the four-inch platforms in the store.

Raffia straps. Sound like a good idea for a shoe, right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. No quicker method currently exists for flensing every last cell of epidermis from the tops of your feet. If that’s your thing, well, great. Otherwise, dear Lord no.

Do not think that you can bust out the heavy patent-leather artillery for that big date, get back to the guy’s place, and slip off the shiny stuff all sexy without bowling your boy over with the acrid stench of trapped, panicking foot, because it’s dark in there, and there’s no air, and your foot is freaking the fuck out down there because it can’t hear a damn thing and it can’t breathe. Get the Dr. Scholl’s inserts with asbestos and give your feet a Xanax, because otherwise, if you put them head-down in patent leather, they’ll wig out and ruin everything and you won’t get laid.

What looks adorable in the Delia’s catalog will necessarily proceed through a funhouse mirror before arriving at your house. This goes double for what looks cute in the Alloy catalog. Because there’s lavender and embroidery and butterflies and love, and then there’s you putting them on and feeling so skanky that you can’t make eye contact with the cats for, like, a week.

A Kenneth Cole sandal is the Ike Turner of footwear. Okay, it sounds like one of my ill-advised flights of bad-metaphorical non-fancy, but check it out. The sandal comes on real strong, right? Makes your feet look gooooood, showers them with sweet looooove, gets all cute and mad when you flirt with a 9 West model, and girl! You can’t believe you got so luuuuucky — at first. But when you’ve fallen for his line, looked the other way when he bled dye and gave you corns, you’ve bought a few pairs, boom — he’ll start in calling your feet too wide and get on you about letting your arches go, and then when you make noises about maybe switching to Steve Madden he beats your feet bloody, and just when you’ve made up your mind to leave, the sandal comes around all “baby, I’m so sorry, I lost my head, you know how I get when you go across the street to look in the window at Fluevog, please forgive me, I brought you the new line for spring, and look at the straps, baby, look at the straps, I’m so sorry, baby, I love you” and your feet will sit in a tub of Epsom salts all sullen like “go to hell, no sandal treats me that way, love ain’t supposed to hurt, I don’t love you no more” and the sandal’s all “I can’t live without you, baby, don’t leave me that way,” and those straps would really make your ankles look like Rita Hayworth’s, but your feet stay strong, “nuh uh, if you loved me you wouldn’t tear me up so bad,” and the sandal slinks to the door and says all pitifully, “All right, baby, I’ll go…if that’s what you really want,” and your feet look down, and they start to cry, and they give in all “promise you’ll never do it again,” and the sandal promises, and he gives your feet tender leather lovin’, and the straps make your ankles look great…and then one night the sandal turns on your little toe in a drunken rage and your foot’s locking itself in the bathroom screaming “NO! NO!” and girlfriend, you know he ain’t no good for you so RUN.

You will never wear the brown shoes. Even when you have something that matches it perfectly, to the point of a tag hanging from the cuff that says, “Hey, you with the brown shoes you never wear — yeah, you. I match those shoes? Perfectly. They made me to match those shoes, in fact. I’m also on sale, actually,” you will still wear the same old black shoes. You will put on the brown shoes, and you will want so badly to wear them — they fit like a big old yummy sock, and they make a luxurious creaking noise when you walk, and if you were Alvin and your outfit were Simon, these shoes would be your-all’s Theodore. You check them in the mirror. You model them for yourself. You look down at them, and they look just right. You almost make it out the door with them on. But then, two minutes before you absolutely have to leave or get there late, you happen past the mirror again to grab your cell phone from the table and you see that you’ve morphed into a foggy-haired Latin teacher, redolent of mothballs and the eraser dust of the ancients, running around all frazzled because the seventh-grade class mother forgot the cupcakes for the Lupercalia party, and you sit straight down on the floor with your coat still on and jerk the brown shoes off without even untying them first because you loved your Latin teacher, but, well, Jesus, you just can’t turn into her on a Friday night and that’s it. And it’ll happen a half a hundred times, and you’ll never get out the door with them on, so buy them in the black or don’t buy them at all.

There’s the people who can wear the thongs in this life, and there’s the people who can’t. If you can, go forth and prosper. If you can’t, you can’t. And you know when you can’t. You’ve tried. You’ve tried many times. Stop trying, for the sake of your sanity. It’s the footwear equivalent of dragging your toes to the company Christmas party — they hate going, always have, and your insistence that they go anyway only breeds resentment.

A shoe that looks adorable on a size six will not necessarily look adorable, or even tolerable, on a size nine. It may not even look like a shoe anymore, but rather like a dugout canoe, or one half of a catamaran, or something else boat-like and sad and fugly. Do not order shoes from catalogs and assume that they will look like the picture. They may look like the picture, of course, but they may also make your calves look like Washington crossing the Delaware. You have too many pairs of frumpy Aerosoles collecting frumpy dust in the frumpiest corner of your closet not to have gotten the picture by now. You have too many “adorable” Mary Janes doubling as doorstops, and too many “sweet” pink shoes that look like Easter-parade floats, and too many “precious” T-straps that you gave away to drag queens not to have figured it out already. Take your lazy ass to an actual store before buying “cute” shoes, because an electric-blue nine narrow isn’t “cute.” It’s a goddamn swim fin.

You cannot predict how a shoe will behave. Cost is no predictor of a shoe’s quality, or comfort. The appearance of a good fit is likewise no predictor of anything; a shoe that resembles a pillow in every possible way, including a little window into the sole revealing actual goose down within, might still find a way to chafe your heel, while a Manolo Blahnik that strongly recalls an eighteenth-century torture device can feel like a tiny strappy pointy cloud. You have no way of knowing. Ten dollars, two hundred dollars…there’s no guarantee. You must subject your feet to The Test to know for sure, and you can tell it’s The Test when you rush out the door already twenty minutes late and of course it’s eight o’clock on a Saturday and you can’t get a cab in the going-out-to-dinner rush, and there’s no train that takes you straight there and if you take the bus you won’t get there for weeks, and you figure it’s not so far so you’ll just walk it, it’s only a mile, the shoes aren’t that new, you’ve worn them around the apartment a bit, it’s not like they’ve just come out of the box, and then you get there, and either the shoes have passed The Test and you still feel so proud of your pretty sassy feet that you want to dance, or they have failed in a miserably abrasive fashion and your feet have mummy-ribbons of flesh coming off them, but you won’t know until The Test.

Carry extra Band-Aids. No, not “two,” amateurs.

Maybe I could sue Kenneth Cole.
Tips for happy feet.
The Footwear Fairies.

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