How Much Are Those Manolos in the Window?

She certainly doesn’t. She’s the one with 500. “For black women, it goes back to slavery times,” she explains. “And when we were so poor.” Overcompensation for cultural deprivation, then, is that it? I imagine a poor black sharecropper woman sitting on a rickety chair on a crumbling porch by a dusty tobacco field, wishing she had 12 pairs of go-go boots. “And as conditions improved, women needed school shoes, church shoes, and before long, you needed 30 to 40 pairs of shoes.”

Whoa, wait. School shoes, right, church shoes, okay. How did we get from two to 30 to 40? This is the disconnect, the part where I get lost. There is some kind of feminine shoe-arithmetic going on here that would make an Enron accountant proud. “Let me see … I need one, two, 40!”

There’s also what I perceive to be a problem with memory. Okay, Shoewomen, I understand you want your feet to look good, but how many options for this are you mentally capable of storing? When deciding what you are going to wear, does your entire catalog appear before you? If you buy more than 200 different versions of something, how can you even remember what you bought?

But Shoewomen can. All of them. It amazes me. It’s like some ancient Chinese mind-control trick, and for the amount of concentration something like this would require of me, I would expect them to froth at the mouth while they mentally review their shoe collections. But they can do it effortlessly, even while having a conversation. Lloyd-Sgambati has already envisioned the outfit she is going to wear tonight at a function: Burberry scarf, chocolate gabardine blouse, simple brown Manolo pumps.

How does she choose? You start with a feeling you want to project, she explains, and find a shoe to match. To Lloyd-Sgambati, heels represent confidence. Flats make you more approachable. I envision women in heels, then flats, and realize that I would perceive a woman in flats to be more approachable, be more inclined to see a woman in heels as being in control. There’s a whole subtle language going on here that I am only aware of in macrocosm. The details have always escaped me.

I have to admit, it is an intriguing idea, that your clothing says something. Like most men, I am shielded against the world of fashion by a vague belief that learning this stuff will somehow undermine me. Shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy don’t curb this attitude; they encourage it. Who are the guys with all the stylish advice? The gays. I’ll just focus on reading about the Eagles’ offensive line, throw the fashion section in the recycle bin, and go on wearing loafers that look like they have recently been run over by a wheat thresher.