At 62, I gave up heels completely and I think I went too far
At 62, I gave up heels completely and I think I went too far
Six things the Barbara boots get right, from a woman who has been in flat shoes since about 2009.
Caroline Richards · Customer · Nottinghamshire · 5 min read
There was no announcement. I did not stand in the bedroom one morning and declare that I was finished with heels. What happened is that I turned my ankle coming out of a restaurant in Southwell about fifteen years ago, in front of people, and I went home and quietly put that pair at the back of the wardrobe, and then over the following year or two everything with any height on it followed them.
And that was that. Flat. Everything flat, ever since.
Which I thought was simply what sensible looked like. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that I had not chosen flat. I had chosen not-that-again, and flat was just where I had stopped running.
How it happens
It is a sensible decision made once, in a bad moment, and then never looked at again. That is the whole mechanism. You do not reconsider it, because reconsidering it would mean standing in a shop holding a shoe and wondering whether you are being daft at your age, and nobody wants to do that on a Tuesday.
So the shoes get flatter and flatter, and because the flat ones that are actually comfortable tend to be the dullest things in the shop, they also get duller, and after a decade you look down at your own feet in a photograph and think, oh. Those are the shoes of somebody who has stopped.
And the bit nobody tells you is what it does to the rest of what you are wearing. Trousers that hung properly when there was an inch under them now puddle on the floor. Everything sits a little lower. You do not look shorter exactly. You look like you have settled.
What I had wrong
I had put every shoe with any height at all into one category, and that category was called heels, and heels were a thing that had made a fool of me outside a restaurant in Southwell.
I had not decided that heels were unsafe. I had decided that one particular heel, on one particular pavement, was unsafe, and then applied it to everything for fifteen years.
Because there is an enormous difference between a thin heel that puts your whole weight onto a point the size of a five pence piece, and a square block of a thing that sits flat underneath your heel and simply does not move. One of those is a balancing act. The other is a step.
The Barbara boots came from Nottingham Boutique, a little shop that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. They are ankle boots in a soft suede-look finish with a square block heel, and I bought the red ones, which is not a sentence I expected to write. They were thirty nine pounds ninety five.
The day they came. I had them on in the kitchen before the box was even off the table.
IT IS A HEEL THAT DOES NOT WOBBLE
The heel is a square block that widens a little as it comes down, so the part actually meeting the floor is broader than the part meeting the sole. It sits directly underneath where your own heel goes, and the whole of it is on the ground. There is no point, no taper, nothing balancing on anything. I walked up our road on the uneven bit by the postbox, which is my personal test track and has caught me out in flat shoes, and there was simply nothing to think about. That is the difference, and it is a difference of engineering rather than of bravery.
From the side. You can see how much of the heel is actually on the floor.
I have not worn anything with a heel since my hip. These I can walk in properly because the whole heel is down.
Maureen A., BleasbyIT IS THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF HEIGHT
Not very much. That is the point and I want to be honest about it rather than sell you something taller than it is. It is a little lift, the sort you notice in how your trousers hang rather than in how high up you are. But a little lift is apparently all it takes, because the hems sit where they are supposed to sit again instead of dragging, and the whole of me reads as slightly more upright, which I did not expect from a pair of boots.
Just enough. I wanted a bit of height without feeling like I was teetering and this is exactly that.
Pat D., AverhamTHE ZIP GOES ALL THE WAY DOWN THE BACK
Full length, top of the boot to the bottom. You open it, your foot goes in without any of the shoving and hopping about, and you zip it up. I know how small that sounds written down. It is not small if you have ever sat on the end of the bed at half past eight trying to force a foot into an ankle boot while the taxi waits, which at our age is a genuinely undignified way to begin an evening.
The back. The zip sits in the middle of the cream panel, the whole height of the boot.
The long zip is why I bought them. On and off without sitting down and without a shoehorn.
Glenda M., HalamTHEY SIT NEATLY UNDER MY TROUSERS
They are a sock fit, which means the top hugs the ankle instead of standing away from it, so there is no gap and no baggy bit where your trouser hem meets the boot. With straight jeans the hem comes down and finishes and the boot carries on and the whole line is clean. The slouchy ankle boots I have owned before always had a sort of crumpled concertina at the top that made my ankles look twice the size.
Under straight jeans. No gap, which is the bit that matters.
Close at the ankle without being tight. They look neat under trousers rather than bunched.
Rita S., ThurgartonTHE COLOUR IS THE WHOLE POINT
I bought red. I had not bought a red anything since the nineteen nineties and I ordered them slightly braced for regret. There was none. Boots are the one place you can put a proper colour where it is nowhere near your face and nothing has to match it, because they are at the bottom and everything above them is already whatever it was. Mine go with the navy, the black and the grey, which is to say with everything I own, because that is all I own.
Mine, by the chair, where they have lived since they arrived.
Went for the mustard and I have never had so many comments on a pair of shoes in my life.
Jean C., Car ColstonTHE BACK OF THEM IS AS GOOD AS THE FRONT
Down the centre back there is a cream stripe with the zip set into the middle of it, running the whole height of the boot from the top down to where the heel begins. You do not see it when you put them on and you never see it when you are wearing them, which is exactly why I like it. Somebody finished the part of the boot that only other people look at. At forty pounds that is not where corners usually survive.
The striped back is lovely and you only notice it when somebody tells you they have noticed it.
Hazel W., KneetonThe Barbara, against the flat black ones I have worn since 2011
I still have the flat black ones and I will still wear them. But setting them side by side was quite a clarifying exercise and I recommend it.
Bought because they were not the restaurant shoes
Completely flat, so the trouser hems drag
Black, like the four pairs before them
Chosen to be unobjectionable
Nobody has ever mentioned them, in fourteen years
Thirty nine pounds ninety five, chosen on purpose
A square block heel, and the hems hang properly
Red, and I am not apologising for it
Chosen because I liked them
Three women asked about them at one coffee morning
About the price
It is £39.95. It was £80.00.
My worry at forty pounds was not whether they would look all right. It was the heel. A block heel is the easiest thing in the world to do badly, because the cheap way is to make it hollow and a fraction too narrow where it meets the sole, and you can feel that the moment you put your weight across it.
These feel solid underfoot and the heel sits square and wide where it meets the ground. The suede-look finish has a proper soft matt nap rather than that shiny plastic look that gives the game away in daylight. They are a suede-look rather than the real thing, which the listing says plainly and which I would rather they said plainly.
I went and read the reviews afterwards, which is the wrong order, I know. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some sites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, "I bought these to see if I could still walk in a heel and it turns out the problem was never me." That would have decided it for me, had I read it first.
Walking back from the shop. The red is the first thing anybody sees.
What I would tell you if we were friends
If you were sat here with a cup of tea I would ask you what you have given up, and then I would ask you when, and then I would ask you what actually happened on the day you gave it up.
Because I think a lot of us are still obeying a decision we made once, quickly, after one bad afternoon, and we have been calling it being sensible ever since. It is not being sensible. Being sensible would be going back and checking whether the thing is still true. I had fifteen years of flat shoes on the strength of one wet pavement in Southwell.
I had not become a woman who cannot wear a heel. I had become a woman who had stopped checking.
You do not have to go mad. A square heel you can actually stand on, in a colour you would not normally pick. That is all this is.
Caroline
BARBARA | Elegant Comfort Ankle Boots
- A steady square block heel that gives a little lift and sits firm underfoot
- Full-length zip down the back, so they go on and off without a struggle
- Sock fit, so they sit close and neat under straight or cropped trousers
- Suede-look faux leather with a soft matt finish
- Rounded square toe, with a leopard or zebra toe cap on selected colours
- Five colours: red, purple, mustard, tan or all-over leopard
- UK 2 to UK 9 · free UK delivery and 30 day returns
The autumn sale is on now, half price.