Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

View from Soho

Obesity's Nether Regions

WhIf I read one more word about the obesity epidemic, I’ll eat a newspaper.  What I want to know is, why is everybody keeping quiet about women’s feet?

We’ve heard all there is to hear about the mortal dangers of eating a chip when we should be living on organic lettuce, and it’s true there are some renegades wobbling along pavements, spilling over bicycle saddles or sprawled across sofas on TV programmes – rogue members of the general public, who really should have planning permission for being that size.

But the warnings come at us so constantly and from so many directions it’s amazing the overweight can escape – those extra pounds must consist of thick skin.  After all, worried thin people are rearing children to calculate their own Body Mass Index before they’re out of nappies, such is the high-pitched screaming from all branches of the media, and we’re all made to feel guilty if we can pinch a spare centimetre of our flesh, let alone an inch.

Yet still nobody mentions the extremities the vast majority of the population are going about on, which bear no resemblance to the shape of feet as I used to know them, and for which it was once a delight to shop.  I have slender feet, which were never a problem – if anything, they were considered an asset.  But now buying shoes is a nightmare, because England, and even the centre of the West End of London, caters almost exclusively for wide feet – and that “almost” only applies if you can afford high quality at the appropriate cost.

Throughout the majority of my life, Oxford Street and Regent Street were lined with ladies’ shoe shops, many of them part of competitively-priced chains.  Saxone, Dolcis, Mansfield, Clarks – all excellent and reasonable.  As a child I’d been taken to that wonderland, the biggest shoe shop in the world, Lilley & Skinner in Oxford Street, where my feet had been carefully measured, but for decades after that there was still a huge choice of stores, in any of which I had absolutely no difficulty in getting footwear that fitted.

Regent Street was my favourite hunting ground because Bally, the Swiss firm, had two branches there, and I loved their styles.  These were admittedly more luxurious and expensive, but not horrendously so, and again I slipped into them as happily as Cinderella.

To get shoes that fitted perfectly, it might have been an experience to visit Rayne’s jewel box of a shop in Regent Street, which had three royal warrants and where exquisite footwear was hand made – not only for royalty but for stars of films and the theatre – but it really wasn’t necessary, because ordinary women on a budget had such a plentiful and reasonably-priced choice.

I remember sitting in a branch of Clark’s, at the Café Royal end of Regent Street, while a dainty woman hovered between various pairs of high heeled delights.  Her husband looked on adoringly while she explained to me that she had double A feet but triple A heels.  God alone knows how she’s managing these days – just about the only option she has is amputation.  And her husband must be a very disappointed man.

For me and the few freaks left like me, it’s torture to enter any competitively priced shoe shop or shoe department, only to discover that everything on sale is in a wide fitting.  And we’re not talking something imaginable, like a B:  wide means a size a camel would feel at home in.  I’m taunted at home, too:  through my letterbox come magazines, out of which fall brochures telling me all their styles are available in Double D or Double EE!

The only place I’ve found with shoes I can recognise and keep on is run by an Italian, who imports his merchandise and shook his head over my arches.  “Slim fitting!” he mourned.  “Those are the hardest to find.”

But at the same time, the most popular style of women’s trousers is so slender and tight they make the wearer look as though they’re nude and painted with blue dye.    Jeggings indeed.  How do the wearers get their feet down those impossibly narrow legs, out into the open again and into to-day’s shoes, each of which would accommodate two of mine side by side?

The fact is, it’s not fatness – people have simply changed shape and become larger over the past decades, and obviously I notice this most when it comes to women’s sizes in anything.  Even if they aren’t an ounce overweight, to-day’s females are apparently bigger, as evidenced by the sizing in Marks and Spencer’s, where tons of clothes are bought by the female population.  In the 1970s, a size 12 in any item of clothing at M and S had a waist measuring exactly 24 inches (60.96 cm).  To-day a size 12 can measure as much as 30 inches (76.2 cm) around the waist.  If a woman wanted to buy something as rare as a size 16 she had to slink into an Outsize Shop with a blanket over her head, feeling an outcast.  Now the rails everywhere are crowded with size 16s and even 18s – in the past that would have been unimaginable.

And so it goes with shoes:  women have, apparently, got wider feet now, and because they’re in the majority manufacturers understandably cater for them.  Whereas once wide feet were so unusual their owners complained of living in discomfort or Wellington Boots, the tables have turned to such an extent that I’m not normal any longer:  I’m out of step, and out of luck if I want economically priced footwear that fits – even in the shopping Mecca I live in, the heart of the West End.

Size Zero models?  They may be skin and bone but I bet their feet are as wide as everyone else’s;   as I’ve said, I’m the one who’s in the wrong.  And I wonder what the future holds, if this goes on – perhaps the time will come when I’ll have to slink into an Undersize Shop somewhere, with a blanket over my head, having spent a year’s rent on approximately-fitting shoes.

© Alida Baxter

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