Every week for about three months in 2005, I would religiously traipse to the shoe hall of Birmingham’s Selfridges and ogle covetously at a pair of Nine West shoe boots. Black suede, with patent brogue details and a sizeable thick heel, these were the “shoots” that I imagined would perfectly nestle inside a wardrobe Venn diagram of organ-squeezing skinny jeans and wispy scarves, that would catapult my secondary school style of shrunken H&M kidswear and TK Maxx Clearance finds into that of Kate Moss. When, one evening after school, I eventually came to try on said shoots with my black school skirt, I wondered aloud why the shoes in question didn’t look quite how I’d imagined.
“It’s because you’ve got short legs,” a blunt 14-year-old friend (teenage frenemy?) replied as I stood on my tippy toes in the mirror. Diminutive legs aside, I didn’t let my stature stop me. Despite the fact that shoes defined as half shoes, half boots, which cut decisively across the ankle, don’t exactly lengthen your legs, shoots were a mainstay of my mid-Noughties wardrobe.
I remember wearing a burgundy suede Carvela style with two (!) layered American Apparel circle skirts when traipsing from my university halls in Camden to Amy Winehouse favourite The Hawley Arms, or a tan Urban Outfitters pair with tasselled laces with a shiny snakeskin slip from Zara with intentionally laddered tights and I think a (shudder) beret. I didn’t have a Tumblr, but if I had, it would have been lit.