How Much Are Those Manolos in the Window?

“It’s Italian leather,” says Evelyn Cintron, a manager at Suburban Square’s fashionable Toby Lerner. “It’s got that feel to it. Good shoes are like jewelry for your feet.” She shows me a pair of Italian boots, probably even nicer than anything offered to Mussolini’s soldiers, and I look at the sole and see the $475 price tag.

“The design, the craftsmanship,” Cintron explains, and gives me that look, the final look you get from someone trying to explain something before they just throw up their hands in frustration. The look says, If I have to tell you this, you’ll never get it. I put the boot back, nodding in appreciation. Yup, it’s a nice boot.

Nancy Weiss, 64, of Bryn Mawr, who has a collection of about 200 pairs, considers appreciation of such shoes to be not just a subculture, but a “higher calling.” She owns a horse in Montana whom she once jokingly considered naming after Italian shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo, because the horse had foot problems and, like her, had a continual need for reshoeing. Her biggest shoe splurge was a pair of bedazzled four-inch heels that retailed for around $500. For Weiss, sometimes appreciation of quality even trumps comfort.

“Who would go walking in four-inch heels across cobblestones unless they look fabulous? Beauty must suffer,” Weiss says playfully. Her explanation for quantity as well as quality? “If you own two pairs, they’ll last three times as long.”

More feminine shoe-arithmetic, but I see her point. Weiss also points out that shoes are a life investment, in that you can keep them around for 10 or 12 years, then unveil them as new again. And the size of your foot doesn’t change significantly when you lose or gain weight, making shoe shopping, unlike other fashion purchasing, a practice that is free of body-image insecurities. But this whole beauty-suffering thing doesn’t sound like fun to me.

“I would never buy shoes that don’t fit right,” says Mindy Friedman. “Comfort is big.” Friedman describes herself as “arty, for a lawyer,” and while she used to be as happy in a cheap shoe store as a high-end one, she finds herself being drawn upward as she gets older. “It’s all about finding the right shoe that fits your personality.”

That sounds like a lot of work. But I’m going to give it a try. I find an expert, and go shoe shopping.