How I Learned To Love Orthopaedic Shoes After Years Of Putting Fashion First

When you open the door to my shoebox downtown Toronto apartment, the first thing you’ll see is a wall of shoes—a ceiling-high bookcase meticulously lined with clogs, loafers and brogues. The shelf is part space-saving measure (high ceilings = vertical storage) and part Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities Renaissance nobility used to display their most precious worldly possessions. And these shoes are, indeed, precious to me: if an academic ever wanted to conduct an anthropological study on black ankle boots, I’m certain one could be completed entirely within the confines of my collection.

As a fashion journalist, former shoe-store employee, daughter of a seamstress and indisputable aesthete, I see my wardrobe as a visual representation of who I am as a person. Fashion is one of the most straightforward paths I have to telegraphing my identity—playful, eccentric, somewhat dark—to the outside world. I quite literally live to get dressed.

So you might imagine my disturb and alarm when it came to my attention last March that I could no longer wear 57 out of my 62 pairs of shoes.

For five years, I had lived with the occasional twinge of pain in my left foot, which usually arose after wearing high heels. I figured any reasonable physician would simply tell me to stop aggravating the pain with finicky footwear, so I stuck to oxford brogues and low-heeled witch boots. But the twinges never quite disappeared, and over time transformed into a sharp, pulsating throb I was aware of at all times. I could feel it when I put on socks; when I did cardio exercises in my living room; when I walked around the city. The breaking point came when I was lying in bed one night in February 2022 and the merest suggestion of fabric brushing my toe caused ripples of pain to surge through my body. In that agonizing moment, I knew it was time to seek help.

My family doctor suggested I try an osteopath, so I booked an appointment with Dr. Liza Egbogah, an osteopath I was friendly with on Instagram, at The Fix Clinic in Toronto. Within the first five minutes of our meeting, she identified the problem: a neuroma, or pinched nerve, which occurs when a nerve is injured, causing a painful “ball-shaped mass” of nerve tissue to grow in the aggravated spot. Over the next hour she broke up the offending cluster and vigorously kneaded the aggrieved nerve all the way up my legs, past my buttocks and back. It was painful beyond measure, but the discomfort felt funny, somehow, and I couldn’t contain my laughter as she worked me like a wet ball of sourdough.

By the time Dr. Egbogah had finished, my brain was so flooded with endorphins that it didn’t occur to me my life was about to change when she asked if I owned a pair of Birkenstocks, then gently issued a dictum that I was only to wear shoes with a toe box wide enough it wouldn’t crush my toes. Forever. Otherwise, I’d risk the danger of the nerve damage spreading up my leg and into my back and could look forward to a lifetime filled with debilitating back pain. It wasn’t until the MDMA-like effect had retreated post-massage that it dawned on me that this new criteria rendered almost all of the shoes I had spent years acquiring utterly unwearable.

Ironically, the advice I had doled out to customers over seven years selling footwear at a high-end shoe store—“they should feel as snug as possible, without any pinching or pain”—had ruined my own feet. According to this wisdom, I had been cramming my feet into shoes a half-size too small for nearly a decade and was finally paying the ultimate price.

The idea of being relegated to comfort footwear in my early thirties filled me with dread. Was I not in the prime of my life, with decades of fun, flirty heels in my future? Would people still perceive me as a stylish person, one of the hallmarks of my identity since I was an early teen? Moreso than other types of collecting, shoe obsessions are often derided as fluff, the vapid preoccupation of women who fancy themselves the protagonist of the Shopaholic series. However, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Kansas in 2012 found that strangers were able to accurately guess personality traits based on footwear alone. Just the previous week I had been pining online over a pair of vintage kitten-heeled Prada boots: pointy-toed, malevolent and fit for a Disney villain. (After all, I’ve always preferred Uncle Scar to Mufasa.)

While I didn’t relish the thought of losing my collection, I knew the pain of being surrounded by shoes I couldn’t wear would be greater than the physical pain of wearing them, so off they went. I sold each pair through Facebook Marketplace and Depop, gingerly packing them into boxes and mailing them off to their new homes in Virginia, Thunder Bay and Markham, Ont.

Did selling each pair of shoes feel like my personality was slowly being stripped away from me? Yes. But my disappointment was quickly supplanted by the realization that this transition (and the money I made from selling my collection) allowed me to engage in that most beloved of activities: acquiring new shoes. I set to work researching styles that would work for my feet, even creating a spreadsheet for options.

I figured if I have a lifetime of ugly footwear ahead of me, I might as well lean into it. I purchased full-on orthopaedic shoes: putty-coloured lace-up moccasin loafers, the very epitome of geriatric chic.

While the “ugly shoe” trend has been cresting for a number of years, actual orthopaedic shoes represent something of a final frontier. Could I really pull off the puffy shoes grandmas used to buy in bulk at Zellers in the ’90s? Turns out the answer is a resounding yes. The appeal of fashion, for me, lies in the thrill of the unexpected. Part of what makes an object truly fashionable is that it feels slightly wrong, inhabiting the razor sharp edge between tasteful and outré. It’s why I’ve noticed some Gen Z’s wearing propeller hats—once a cartoonish hallmark of classic nerd culture appropriated into a subversive market of cool. Paradoxically, wearing something so conversely naff makes me feel like I’m even more stylish. Strangely enough, no one around me seems to have noticed the shift. The only enthusiastic endorsement has been offered by my painter friend, whose style skews towards Renaissance puffy-sleeved shirts worn with novelty baseball hats.

My neuroma hasn’t gone away—sometimes out of nowhere I still feel like my toe has been dislocated, even in specialty shoes—but I do love the stability, both literal and figurative, that wearing orthopaedic shoes has brought into my life.

When you have something taken away from you, you learn to live without it in a way that makes you question the way you were living before. My shoe obsession was costing me time and money, and I only wore about half of my original collection with any regularity. Losing my abundance of shoes has, strangely enough, made me feel freer, and prompted me to learn how to redefine who I am, quite literally from the ground up.

As I age, my priorities have shifted. While fashion is still important to me, so is taking care of my body. With orthopaedic shoes laced on my feet I genuinely feel like I’m doing both. I wear them in the same manner most people would wear sneakers, lacing them up with any outfit and racing towards one’s day. The soles are pleasantly squishy, and I enjoy the feeling of padding along the sidewalk. Now when I bounce around town in them, I feel like I own the world.