A Letter From a Reader

At 55, I Had Stopped Buying Tall Boots. I Wore These Ones Out of the Box and Walked All Day.

I have written here twice, about a wardrobe gone black and a jumpsuit I said no to for eleven days. A great many of you wrote back and added a line at the end about your feet, as though that were a separate subject. It is not.

There is a pair of tall boots in the bottom of my cupboard that I have worn four times in six years.

They were expensive and they are beautifully made. I wore them to a client meeting on the Plateau and came home with a raw patch on the back of each heel the size of a dollar coin.

Is today a day I can afford to be uncomfortable from three o'clock onward.

The shop said what shops always say. Give them two weeks. Thick socks. I did all of it, and they were still a pair of boots I had to make a decision about. Eventually I stopped taking them out, and stopped buying tall boots at all.

See if your size is still in stock

How it happens

Nobody decides to give up on a whole category of shoe. It happens because the trade agreed on something years ago and nobody has checked it since. A proper boot hurts at first, and it is presented as a virtue. Good leather needs breaking in, madame, it will mould to your foot.

What that asks of you is two weeks of letting your foot argue with a stiff object, and accepting whichever of you gives in first. Sometimes it is the boot. Very often, at our age, it is the foot.

What I had wrong

My mistake is a stupid one given what I do for a living. I had put comfort in the same drawer as softness.

Which is absurd, because I would never say that about a chair. I have spent twenty two years telling clients that a chair is not comfortable because it is padded. It is comfortable because of where the load sits and what is holding it. Padding is the last thing I look at, and almost always the first thing the client mentions. I had never turned that on a boot.

A boot needs breaking in because there is something rigid inside it that has an opinion about the shape of your foot. Take the rigid parts out and there is nothing left to break.

There are three of them. Press the back of a boot that hurt you and you will find a hard cup behind the heel, put there to hold the shape on the shelf. That is what took the skin off me. Run your hand up the shaft. If it is lined it bends in one place only, so it creases there, and that crease works at the front of your ankle all day. And much above four centimetres of heel tips you forward, so your toes carry the weight your heel was built to carry.

See if your size is still in stock

Sophie, and the nine kilometres

I would not have found these on my own, because I had stopped looking. Sophie is the only person who tells me the truth about anything I am about to buy. We walk on Sunday mornings, around the mountain, and it is a proper walk. In June she turned up in tall taupe boots and I assumed she had lost her mind.

We did nine kilometres. I made her take them off at my kitchen table afterwards and there was nothing to see. No mark on the heel, no red line across the foot. She had bought them eight days earlier and never worn them around the house first. They are called the Nova, from EmmaVancouver, a small Canadian shop out west that sells directly rather than through the department stores.

What happened at the Thursday

I ordered a pair the same evening, expecting to send them back. They came on the Thursday, and I had a client at two on the Plateau in a building with no lift. I put them straight on, out of the box. That was not bravery. That was wanting to know quickly, inside the thirty days.

I got home at a quarter past six. Four flights twice, a showroom on Saint Laurent, the walk from the metro at both ends. I took them off in the hall and sat there looking at my feet, because there was nothing to see.

At dinner that Saturday, Marie Josée, who has known me since 1998 and has said one sentence about my clothes in all that time, looked under the table and asked what they were. Then said, quietly, that she has a wide foot and has not bought a tall boot since her fifties began. Four of the seven of us looked them up before the cheese.

Three things I have learned since

One. The punching is structural, not decorative. A shaft with that many openings has no single weak line to fold along, so it gives in every direction and gathers softly at the ankle instead of creasing across the front of it. There is nowhere for a crease to form. The air moves too, so after eleven hours my feet are not damp.

Two. There is nothing hard behind the heel. Put your hand inside the back and there is soft suede, and then the outside of the boot. Nothing cupped, nothing with a fixed idea about where your foot ends, and so nothing to break in.

Three. The heel keeps you level, and level is the whole game. A low stacked block, a little under four centimetres, wide across the bottom. You get the line of a heeled boot without your weight sliding forward onto your toes.

About the price

The Nova is $119.95. It was $299.95.

My first thought was not what a bargain. It was that the three hundred was never real, which is nearly always what a large number beside a small number means. So I looked. A Canadian shop selling directly, no department store in the middle taking its half, clearing a perforated boot in the last week of August because September is about to land on them.

Then I did the other thing I always do, which is read the bad reviews before I read a single good one.

The two star reviews say two things and both are worth having. It is not a deep winter boot, because the air that keeps your feet dry in September will not thank you in February slush. And take your ordinary size, because there is nothing here that has to stretch.

See if your size is still in stock

What I would tell you if we were sitting together

If there is a pair of good boots in the bottom of your cupboard that you have worn four times, and you have decided that tall boots are not for you any more, the thing you decided was never true. You did not have the wrong feet. You had a boot with three rigid parts in it and nobody told you they were optional.

Not because a boot changes anything. It does not. I have the same knees and the same staircase that I had in May. But there is something in walking out of the house at half past eight without first making a small calculation about your own feet, and I had forgotten it was even on offer.

Take your ordinary size. They run from a US 4 through to a 13.5, the middle of that range goes first, and the sale is on because the season is turning.

Claire

About the writer. Claire Beaulieu is 55, lives in Outremont, Montreal, and works as an independent interior design consultant. She is not a fashion writer.

This page is an advertisement for EmmaVancouver.