The Black Blog

Heels and Cobble Stones

Posted At : 21 September 2009 12:41 | Posted By : Abi
Related Categories: Black, accessories, Fashion

The blown-up faces of famous King’s College London alumni beamed at me as I walked up The Strand. Thomas Hardy, Desmond Tutu, Rory Bremner. I’m sure Keats did a stint there too. The college, almost 200 years old, has a handful of students who will endure history.

I went to King’s so I was more than aware of the cobble-stone treachery of its magnificent neighbour – Somerset House, 16^th Century home of The Privy Council, the Courtauld Institute of Art and currently London Fashion Week. When

Fashion isn’t being done in it, the quad opens up and hundreds of pin-thin fountains shoot skyward and in the summer children play among them and you feel somehow that London – right at that moment – could wipe the floor with anywhere in the world.

But as I made my way through the marble-pillared entrance to see the quad eaten up by the Fashion stage I was aware of two warring elements. Heels and cobble stones. A pairing akin to tight-rope and piranha pool. Girls seemed to be out-heeling each other in some sort of extreme sport. You see, there had been much chatter about heels at New York Fashion Week, to the extent that it was ALL ABOUT HEELS. So I saw a lot of people wearing very high heels, cursing the ground beneath them.

I am a faller-over. The worst type – where I pull a face, crash to the ground and pull someone down with me and pretend it never happened. I went off to my appointments in shoe boots.

Unlike the grand permanence of Somerset House, Fashion is ephemeral. Plotting the Fashion trajectory is like catching a butterfly or showing someone a shooting star. It is the quest for the definitive resulting in confused, encircling chatter - butterfly nets booming out into the ether: 'the highest heels', ‘sequins’, ‘shoulders’, ‘rosettes’, ‘patent’, ‘tassels’. And names. So many names. And places. And exclamation marks. Naturally, the closer one becomes to nailing it, the faster it will etherise – and that is why it causes a scrum. Desire is about not being able to possess.

I love Fashion. I love how it moves things on and I love the excitement it causes. But I love style more. I love it because it is subjective, undictated and it comes from an open, unimpressionable mind. Style is what makes you feel your most superior, world-ready self. There are no value judgements behind it – in much the same way that literature can be neither good nor bad, but enjoyable.

So once the heels come off, sequins are next in line and then after that who knows? But I can count on the fact that Black will never go out of style like I can count on those cobble stones outliving us all.