THE SHOE PEOPLE

The shoe people are obviously ashamed of what they sell these days, aren't they? I mean, ten years ago you'd see an advertisement in a magazine for shoes and it would focus on people's feet, what they were wearing on their feet, what they were doing with their feet. You'd look in the window of a shoe shop and they'd have a blow-up of desert boots or mules or flip-flops or something.

These days, the window display is a picture of a model on a catwalk. Whether she's wearing shoes or not - we don't know. The picture's cropped so that we can’t tell. That information is on a need-to-know basis only, and the shoe people aren't sharing it with us.

In magazines, it's a photograph of an attractive woman in a bikini, who's wearing heels. What are these adverts meant to be telling us? If you're a young woman who spends an inordinate amount of time in a bikini... you might want to try these shoes with that ensemble. Who is the target audience here? Strippers and lap dancers?

It's reached a point now where if I see a woman in her skimpies I know she has a hidden agenda. She just wants to sell me shoes.