A little personality in her shoe might help a bride put her best foot forward

By: Samantha Critchell, The Associated Press

 

NEW YORK, N.Y. - No offence to Cinderella, but she sort of had it backwards. The shoe should be at the end of the to-do list for a wedding fairy tale.
After the engagement, first consider the venue, then the dress — then the shoes and other accessories, experts say. Collectively, they should have a complementary vibe.
"It's all a picture that comes together," says gown designer Reem Acra.
No flip-flops for a formal setting and dress, and satin pumps would be silly on the beach.
Tanya Dukes, accessories editor at Brides magazine, suggests these practical questions:
—How high for the heel? Think of the proportions of the dress, how tall you'll stand and if you are used to wearing heels at all, she says.
—Is the wedding outside? A lawn wedding, for example, could be trouble for a spiky heel. A wedge would fare better.
—How formal is the occasion? Fabric matters here. "Satin is the traditional choice, and it's a safe bet," Dukes says.
And then there's deciding whether you ever want to wear the shoes again.
"Most women don't wear their bridal shoes again not because they're not wearable, but because they're a memento," says footwear designer Stuart Weitzman, who got his start in business in bridal more than 25 years ago. "I make every bridal shoe in dyeable satin, so you could wear them again, but you'd lose the memento, and then you'd wear those dyed shoes once and ruin those 'bridal shoes.' Most women never throw them out."
Weitzman says his success in this market is due partly to an observation by Judith Leiber, founder of the famous beaded bag collection, who noted an "ugly bluish tone" to most wedding shoes. He created a pair out of Swiss lace, won a design award for them and the rest is history.
He sees as much variety in wedding-shoe styles as he does on the street: Women want sandals, stilettos, platforms and lace booties, but the traditional pump is the most popular.
Shoes often spend most of the big day covered by the gown's hemline, but they can be a glimpse of the bride's personality. The moment the shoes will probably get the most attention is right before she kicks them off to dance, says Acra with a laugh.
Crafting a head-to-toe mood is a delicate balancing act between modernity and timelessness, she explains. Now, the shoe? That's a place to have a little fun.
"If I have a bride in the showroom, I might say, 'Why not an orange shoe?'" Acra says. "It's fun to have something different. I love playing with shoes. I really prefer colored shoes or something with bling or fun."
Metallics are a good middle-of-the-road option, as is blush pink, and even black is doable, especially if you add a black ribbon sash around the waist of the dress.
"I do think more out-of-the-box choices will be revisited and worn again," says Brides' Dukes. "Maybe something with a lot of colour, you're more likely to wear that again, like a red shoe, or cowboy boots or sneakers."
She adds, however: "If you want the memento, your Cinderella slipper, and you want to keep them pristine, then white is a valid choice."
There is more variety now than ever in gown silhouettes — including shorter cocktail dresses, asymmetrical high-low hemlines, slim columns and mermaid shapes, in addition to the ballskirt — and that does mean almost endless choices in footwear.
Bring multiple pairs of shoes to gown fittings to explore the options, recommends Acra, who chooses the overall look for models in her bridal runway shows and personally consults with some private clients.
The most important thing, as with all decisions on the bride's look, is that she is happy and comfortable in it, Acra says. "When you're walking down the aisle, really no one will be looking at your shoe. But you'll remember what you were wearing, and if it was bright red, when you talk to your children 20 years later, you can say, 'I was ahead of my time.'"

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Best running shoes? No fast answer, experts say

Runners in the Sydney Marathon cross the Harbour Bridge in Sydney on Sept. 16. / Rob Griffith, AP

If the return of cooler weather across the nation motivates you to begin running or to pick up where you left off, your first step might be to invest in new shoes.The choice now can be bewildering with all the lightweight, flexible shoes flooding the stores and posing a stark contrast to the traditional, heavily cushioned, rigid ones.
Running shoes fuel annual sales of more than $5 billion. A good pair costs you $100 to $140 whether stiff or flexible. Take your time deciding, medical experts and researchers say, or you could be dealing with an injury that becomes chronic or takes months to heal.
The new generation of lighter shoes has minimal cushioning across the bottom. The shoes are flexible front to back and side to side and have lower heels. Their design springs from the barefoot running craze and is based on a technology for runners who are midsole or forefoot strikers, meaning they strike first with that part of their foot. This style of running became trendy after Christopher McDougall's wildly popular 2009 book, Born to Run, about Tarahumara Indians who run 150-miles plus at a time in Mexican canyons, where they live,
with only the lightest of support on their feet. McDougall, who had many injuries as a "shod'' runner, embraced barefoot running.
Traditional shoes are mostly for heel-to-toe strikers, dating back to the early 1970s when the first waffles started appearing on the bottom. Gradually more and more cushioning and support were added, first under the heel and then into the mid and front part of the shoe to protect the foot from impact. They developed along with the jogging craze.

"There are people who are really pushing the minimalist shoe," says Steve Messier, director of the Wake Forest University Runners' Clinic. "But anyone who starts to talk about this shoe is better than that shoe is speculating. The point is we don't really know yet which kind of shoe is better. There's not enough science yet to support it."
Research published in the journal Nature in 2010 found people who run barefoot produce fewer pounds of force when their feet hit the ground compared with shod runners. Lead researcher Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., wrote "forefootand midfoot gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, and may protect the feet and lower limbs from impact-related injuries experienced by a high percentage of runners."
The main goal of any runner, Messier says, is to stay injury free.
"They love running and don't want to have to stop,'' he says. "We hear about it when they do have to stop for any reason. Nothing else can replace their running, they tell us. We understand them."
When it comes to buying new shoes he says, "the first question I ask people is why switch to a different style? Is it because it's trendy? If it's not broken why fix it? We're confident running improves quality of life and we like to see people run into their 80s or 90s.''
Irene Davis says she is confident barefoot running strengthens your feet and improves your running. Nicknamed the "Barefoot Running Professor," she is director of the Spaulding National Running Center at Harvard.
She notes about 80% of runners get injured in any year. "So it's not like (traditional) shoes are really preventing injuries," she says.
The key problem with traditional shoes, she says, is a cushioned heel promotes a rear foot strike that is associated with greater impact loads. It also stiffens the leg, she says, and doesn't allow the leg to better support the body's weight. This stiffness is possibly what has led to some of the most common runner injuries (shin, knee and hip problems).
Running barefoot or in a minimalist shoe strengthens the foot and allows it to carry load, she says, but adds "you need to take it slow when you're getting started."
When forefoot striking, runners switch to run a shorter stride (take a long stride and you'll land on your heel; that hurts when barefoot or in a minimal shoe.) She says they retrain people at the running center how to stride when making the transition.
How to tell if a shoe is designed for fore foot striking? She says if you can't easily twist and bend the shoe than it is too stiff.
But pay attention. Here's where the debate continues. Naomi Shields, an orthopedic surgeon and spokesperson for the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, says if she can take a shoe and twist the toe back to the heel, then it does not have enough support.
"I can tell you I've been seeing so much tendinitis and stress fractures in feet that have taken people out of running because they're wearing these lightweight shoes,'' she says."It used to be flip-flops sending people to me, now it's these."
But serious runners might have other reasons to switch: They want to pick up speed and think the shorter stride and lighter shoes help. Is that necessary for weekend warriors?
Shields says if people run or jog 8- to- 11 minute miles, then more than likely they're heel-to-toe runners and need a supportive shoe. "You're not going to pick up much speed if you were to switch anyway," she says.
Messier says unless you're an elite male athlete (2 hours, 30 minute marathon)or elite female athlete (2 hours, 50 minute marathon), why rush to change?
"My recommendation would be to wait until the research is out," Messier says. "The important thing is you're able to run for the rest of your life. Running improves so many parts of your life from a physical standpoint to an emotional standpoint."
Davis,who runs barefoot about 12 miles total a week because "it's the most natural way to run," says if you're starting out barefoot or wearing a minimalist shoe take it slowly.
"We've deconditioned our feet in cushioned shoes,'' Davis says. "They move us away from moving the way we're supposed to run. We can recondition our feet."
But slow and easy, she warns. "My recommendation the first time is three minutes. And then build up to running longer. We have to be careful until we have more data, but we're working on finishing some new research now."

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As the Chinese so wisely say: Don't tie your shoelaces in a melon field

My father, Claud Cockburn, invented a game in which participants made up national sayings that had to be completely meaningless but sound appropriate to their purported country of origin.

An example could be the traditional Norwegian saying, "the tree is taller than the highest wave" or, as they say in India, "all is not nothingness, nor the nothingness all".
The idea for the game came to him on the top of a bus in London which was crawling along in a traffic jam. He overheard a passenger in the seat in front of him complain to a friend about their slow pace, whereupon the friend gave a resigned shrug of the shoulders and replied, "speed is what you make it". The meaninglessness of the words impressed my father along with a sense that the mustn't-grumble-but-endure tone of the speaker was peculiarly British.
The sayings should appear at least vaguely meaningful at first sight. For instance, there is the French proverb "il y a des gants sans les mains dedans – some gloves have no hands in them". Plausible proverbs devoid of meaning are not necessarily easy to manufacture. At first, the traditional Scandinavian saying, "the pine is tall, but does not reach the sky" looks like a winner, but it contains the trite idea that the large or successful have their limitations. A similar objection might rule out the nostrum of Norfolk country folk, in fact invented by my wife, which holds that "burrowing badgers catch no butterflies".
National sayings may be dull from overuse or were shallow stuff in the first place. As a foreign correspondent, I used occasionally to buy books of local proverbs, hoping that I could use one in an article to illustrate some news event in the country where I was reporting. Inclusion of an obscure but exotic local nostrum in my copy was much better than a quote from a diplomat and would hopefully give the reader the impression that I had my finger on the pulse of indigenous culture and tradition. I did this in Haiti in the early 1990s and again in Afghanistan 10 years later. My idea never really worked out because people in lots of countries seem to have made the same true but banal observations about life. Friends in Beirut used to tell me political jokes with tears of laughter running down their faces, but then had to give me a tutorial on who-was-who in Lebanese politics before I could even pretend to laugh at the right moments.
Sayings by individuals are generally more interesting than national proverbs, but the appetite for these soon cloys. Those most frequently quoted in dictionaries of quotations come across as self-important, patronising and with a firm grip on the obvious. Often they sound plain wrong or are speaking for effect, as with Gertrude Stein declaring that "in the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is". This has a contrived midnight-oil feel to it as does Stein's overused remark, speaking of Oakland, California, that "there is no there there". The quote used to be especially favoured by foreign writers and journalists making snide remarks about the supposed lack of character of American heartlands.
Jokes can be more telling about national character and beliefs than proverbs, though really good ones that don't sound dated are rare. For instance, there is an Israeli joke used to describe a succession of senior Israeli military officers in recent decades which simply says, "he was so stupid that even the other generals noticed". This tells one more about what many well-informed Israelis privately think of their military commanders than a dozen carefully written analyses of the Israeli army.
The British sometimes claim that their humour is too subtle and ironic to appeal to those from different cultures. An example often cited is the famous Punch cartoon of the 1930s showing two hippos in a tropical pool, one saying to the other, "I keep thinking it's Tuesday". When I was about eight years old I was given a 20-volume collection of old Punch cartoons that dated from the beginning of the First World War until the end of the 1930s and which I found very unfunny. I can remember only one cartoon that seems genuinely amusing in retrospect. It shows a parliamentary candidate on a platform addressing a political meeting with the Union flag behind him. In contrast to contemporary cartoons, there are several lines of dialogue underneath. So far as I recall, they read: "Voice from audience: 'Can the candidate explain why the Union Jack behind him is upside-down?' Candidate (glancing round): 'I can only suppose that the person who put it there was so lacking in common patriotism that he did not know the correct position of our national emblem.' Voice from audience: 'Well, it isn't upside-down.' "
Proverbs and memorable remarks inevitably degrade into clichés through overuse. Famous quotes, such as the denunciation of Roman imperialism put into the mouth of a British resistance leader by Tacitus – "they make a desert and they call it peace" – has echoed down the centuries but loses impact through overfamiliarity.
Collections of quotations tend to draw on a limited pool of predictable contributors. By way of contrast, what is striking about the recently published Quips & Quotes: A Journalist's Commonplace Book by my friend Richard Ingrams is its freshness, scepticism and depth. Put together haphazardly by the author over the last half-century, it is a mix of quotes from people long forgotten and others still famous. Their sayings bubble with originality. Lenin quotes are fairly common but I never knew he had said that "the best government has only to be in power long enough for everybody to wish to remove it". The statement is simple enough but worth bearing in mind as an explanation for every revolution in history down to the Arab Spring uprisings last year. There is the same sort of compelling simplicity in the words of William Cobbett, the great radical journalist, who wrote that "it is the chief business of a government to take care that one part of the people does not cause the other part to lead miserable lives".
Not many people remember Sefton Delmer, the chief foreign correspondent of the Daily Express in the 1950s, but he once said: "I can only think clearly in a five-star hotel." He is quoted as saying on another occasion that "in real life, the women pursue the men. It is only in Somerset Maugham that the men pursue the women". I particularly like the remark of Peter Cook: "Cricket is nothing if it is not one man pitted against a fish."
Few real proverbs are as interesting as these. But my father discovered two, both Chinese, that are equal in appeal and which I have never seen quoted elsewhere. One says: "Do not tie your shoelace in a melon field or adjust your hat under a plum tree if you want to avoid suspicion." The other competes with Peter Cook's in its cryptic allure: "Of nine bald men, eight are deceitful and the ninth is dumb."

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