Submitted by admin on Fri, 2005-11-11 09:00. ::
Sure, she snagged a prince and a palace. But her transformation from a girl of servitude into a woman of strength is the real lesson. Or so author Susan Reynolds believes.
"Cinderella is one of those archetypal images you can't forget. She appears in more than 700 cultures dating back to the ninth century in China," she says. "Her shoes play such a big part in the story because they're a symbol of her realizing who she is."
The more down-to-earth ones get a lift simply by shoe shopping at T.J. Maxx. The more extravagant hop planes to shoe shop in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. They display their prized possessions in enormous closets fit for a queen.
"I have a couple hundred pairs. And once a week I usually get a new pair," says Warren, who works for a technology consulting firm and has been encouraged by friends to one day open a shoe museum.
Clinical psychologist Nicole Tobias says she's never met a person with a shoe addiction. Tobias is director of counseling and disability services at the Art Institute of California in San Francisco where fashion design is a daily focus.
"Obsessiveness (about shoes) doesn't have to be a bad thing," she says. "If I were a person who shops for shoes often, it wouldn't necessarily mean I had a problem."
Consider that 54 percent of single women (mostly in their 30s) surveyed by soundinvesting.org said they were likely to accumulate 30 pairs of shoes before accumulating $30,000 in retirement savings.
"The thing is though, men collect things too," Tobias says. "It's probably something more like stamps or coins rather than shoes, but we don't pathologize those hobbies."
Shoe labels have become nouns, i.e., "Manolos" and "Jimmy Choos," with credit going to shoe-obsessed TV characters such as Carrie Bradshaw of "Sex and the City."
Bill Boettge, president of the National Shoe Retailers Association in Columbia, Md., says that TV show in particular has had a tremendous influence on women's shoe-buying habits.
The NPD Group, which tracks consumer spending, confirms women are spending more on fashionable footwear rather than sensible shoes. For example, sales of stiletto and kitten-heel shoes were up 18 percent and 9 percent, respectively, last year over plain old block-heeled shoes.
Not only did "Sex and the City" expand the shoe horizon for the average woman, it bolstered the careers of some of the world's best shoe designers. Their sales took off because somehow owning the shoes was more important than the fit, the comfort or the price tag.
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