The shoes are popular with oldies, from princesses to fashionistas. And Elinor Goodman loves her leopard-skin pair
When she was my age – in her seventies – my maternal grandmother had two pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers.
Both shoes were lace-ups on sturdy, two-inch heels, of the kind nannies or schoolmistresses wore.
My paternal grandmother had two similar pairs and a pair of wellington boots because she lived on a farm.
Both had roughly the same uniform: tweed, pleated skirts, cream blouses and a long cardigan with a pocket for a handkerchief.
My mother was much more fashion-conscious well into her nineties. Her favourite magazine was Vogue. She was aware of trends – big bows at the neck and padded shoulders when Mrs Thatcher was power dressing.
She would take the hems up and down – just the right amount above or below the knee to conform with the direction of travel laid down by fashion editors.
And she always looked good.
Her biggest regret was her feet – which I have inherited. A doctor stupidly told her when she was 12 that she wouldn’t be able to walk as an adult because they were so weak.
In fact, she could walk almost up to the time she died, but only if she wore shoes made for her by the NHS, stuffed with arch supports. They were flat leather lace-ups – one grey pair and one navy. She despaired of ever looking really glamorous in them.
How much easier it would be for her today. Now everybody wears trainers.
They evolved many years ago out of shoes worn for exercise. When I was a child, my mother would never have let me swap my Start-Rite sandals for them: ‘only village children’ wore plimsolls, as they were called then.
Now they cross all class divides. When ITV’s Robert Peston interviewed former prime minister Liz Truss at the Tory Party conference, both of them were wearing trainers.
Peston complained recently that he was forced to remove his trainers at a London gentlemen’s club and borrow some of their smart shoes.
Princess Alexandra is said to wear trainers at formal functions. The former MP Nicholas Soames, now a peer, wears trainers with Savile Row suits. Other MPs wear trainers to speed between the Millbank TV studios and the Commons.
The trend accelerated in lockdown. When I crept back to London after almost two years in the country, everyone of all ages seemed to be wearing trainers.
Some carried bags with high heels in them for meetings with clients or to pop into the Ritz, which bans trainers (the nightclub Annabel’s will let you in, provided they are ‘fashion’ trainers). When the late Peter Cook was asked to remove his before gambling at the Ritz Casino, he said, ‘What? My lucky trainers?’
Alongside everyday trainers, I have a leopard-skin pair, expressing my inner Theresa May, and another pair with sparkly stars. I wore these recently at a funeral.
Fashion magazines show young models wearing floral dresses with ‘elevated trainers’. One magazine assured an anxious reader that flowery trainers are fine for weddings. And according to the Guardian, ‘trainers with a trouser suit became the go-to look for CEOs doing Ted Talks’. Influencers offer advice on what colour trainers to wear: white last year.
The problem is once your feet have got used to comfort, they rebel angrily when pressganged into high heels. And there are certain things you can’t do in trainers – such as dance the tango, or dine at certain men’s clubs. One woman is currently involved in a legal suit with a staid City club whose rules insisted on a trainers ban.
On a recent trip to that emporium of middle-class respectability Peter Jones, 80 per cent of the women were wearing trainers or rubber-soled jodhpur boots. The only stilettos were on mannequins in the windows.
It won’t last. When the older generation starts wearing the uniform of the young, the younger generation moves on.
My generation likes to think of itself as not bound by the rules that meant most grandmothers dressed alike 60 years ago.
We wear jeans, almost regardless of the shape of our backsides. We like to think we are expressing our individuality by wearing whatever skirt length we like, bright colours and voluminous knitwear to cover the bulges.
I have a vision of the time when I have to go into a home. All the residents will be wearing trainers. Some well-meaning, irritating entertainer will urge us to get up and dance in them. They will be as much a uniform for us as those little, heeled lace-ups were for my grandmothers.
Grandchildren, meanwhile, will have their feet in plaster after operations for bunions from wearing stilettos after trainers went out of fashion.
Elinor Goodman was political editor of Channel 4 News, 1988-2005
