[Ansteorra] Cheap footwear.

Samantha Smith sasmith0 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 30 10:10:08 PST 2009


Methinks our Hanse may be speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, you know, but
us Germans are lucky in that we get to dress in the most effusive bad taste.
Hanse just does it because he's Hanse. Take him seriously at your peril. ;-)

There are always shoe options. Currently my favorites for most events
(especially the ones where you don't see my feet much) are a pair of
square-toed Mary Janes from the Naturalizer outlet. They aren't perfect, but
they'll do in a trice.

The Chinese cotton or tapestry shoes will also do on a budget. They aren't
comfortable, they aren't exactly period, but they have a periodish look and
they're cheap, cheap, cheap. If you live in or near a largeish city,
something with a mall or some other shop with Asian-insipired merchandise,
you will find these shoes. The buckles bend and snap when you sneeze on
them, the black dye destroys your socks, and they fall apart when they touch
dew, but they'll work.

I intend to try out the create-your-own-latchets trick with some Goodwill
shoes.

The problem with buying period shoes on a budget is illustrated with
surprising effectiveness by one of my favorite authors as follows:

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus
allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an
affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then
leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those
were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so
thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the
feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who
could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his
feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap
boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would
still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic
unfairness."

If you spend the hundred or two hundred or three hundred dollars (or even
the eighty. Or even the seventyish if you buy one set of boots and one set
of turnshoes in the deal I just found on revival.us) on really, really good
boots, you won't need another pair for years. If you spend ten dollars on
the cloth Chinese shoes and you go to more than one event a year, you will
need to replace them much more often.

Many of us cannot easily afford expensive shoes, just as you say. Once every
few months I go to the Plantagenet Shoes website and a few tears fall from
my eyes as I look at the beautiful, beautiful shoes I cannot afford. But
I'll eat beans and rice for two months to buy ten yards of silk twill and I
make my undergarments out of cheap-but-good linen. I'll save and save and
spend seventy dollars on good boots instead of thirty dollars on semi-OK,
uncomfortable shoes, and until I have them I'll wear the closest analogue I
have.

We have so many options, though. I'm dashed lucky to live in a barony with
so many talented people. I know that I can beg, buy, or barter services,
items, or even some good cooking for some help with this kind of thing.
Heck, if I'm interested in knowing how to do it, I know at least one local
gentle who will teach me to make my own shoes as long as I provide the
materials. We have so many options and so many resources at hand: we must
remember not to discount them or waste opportunities simply to do something
that feels impossible. While some of us delight in the costumes of nobility,
don't forget that you can also portray someone who had much less money than
you.

Sophie



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