What did you wear as a teenager? Were you brought up in the era of 90s neon, grunge, skater, goth? If you remember all the clothes that are currently being sold in New Look the first time round (and the music they’re playing too, for that matter) then you were probably a 90s teen and, like me, probably had a pair of DMs permanently glued to your feet. This Tuesday Shoesday blog post is dedicated to my teenage feet and the new boots I’m stomping around in – my Doc Martens.
I know I’ve written about my search for reasonably priced DMs in the past (actually it was on my 100th blog post back in 2001 and now that I’ve just reached 900 blog posts I think it’s safe to revisit it now!) and how I’d settled on buying a pair of similar chunky pull-on boots from Barratts. The fact that they didn’t last beyond the first frost, cracked across the sole and had to be replaced by a pair from Office was frustrating, even though my Office boots have been on my feet ever since. However, the effect of these boots wasn’t quite what I was going for – I felt more sophisticated rather than teenage in my Office boots. So I carried on looking, and when a pair of knee-high Doc Marten boots were reduced in the Oxfam Fashion sale last year, I snapped them up and excitedly waited for them to arrive and I wrote all about them here. But when I laced them up for the first time I realised why I’d never bought knee-high lace-ups in the past – they took ageeees to do up. And everyone knows that you need to wear your DM boots as often as possible to fulfil their comfort potential, and I simply couldn’t spare the time to lace them up every day. So they went back in to their box and I just looked at them every so often so that they didn’t feel left out. I still loved the look of the DMs, but these taller boots weren’t exactly right to recreate my daily teenage look.
If I’m too lazy to lace up ankle-boots what hope was there for knee-highs?
So when my husband presented me with a big box in those unmistakable yellow-and-black colours at Christmas I was excited and tore my way into the shoe box. And there they were – the exact pair of black ankle boots that I’d worn throughout my teen years with tiny skirts and 40 denier tights. I had no idea that he’d bought me these boots – I hadn’t even put them on my extensive Christmas list – so he’d not only been reading my blog and listening to my reminiscing about my teenage self, but he’d actually gone out and bought a pair for me in the right size and, best of all, he hadn’t paid full price for them! Christmas is an odd occasion in our thrifty household where we hand over an amazing present that the other person loves, and then we make the gift-giving even better by telling them how much money we saved on buying it! Then we can all be truly impressed by our bargain hunting skills AND the gift itself.
Caitlin Moran images from an interview I’ve enjoyed reading in GQ
I pulled on my favourite thermal-lined tights (yes, I have grown up in some ways since my teens) and I put on my new Doc Martens. They immediately felt comfortable – much more so than the knee-high boots – and as I looked in the mirror, I saw my teenage legs reflected back at me. I felt like a cross between the 15-year-old me heading out to the youth-club disco thinking I was the bees knees and super-star writer Caitlin Moran in one of her columns (ha, I wish!). As it was Christmas day and I’d already planned to wear my red lace dress, I soon began to resemble a blonde Lily Allen in my prom dress and chunky boots, and I felt great! It’s amazing how a pair of boots affect the way you feel and the way you carry your self, but they really did make a difference to my life and have done every time that I’ve put them on my feet since.
So hubby got mega bonus points this Christmas and I have never known another item of clothing to have the ability to transport me back to my teenage years so successfully. Let me know if you’ve ever experience anything like this yourself and do you still have any of your teenage shoes tucked away in your wardrobe? I think I need to hunt out the first pair of glitter dolly-shoes I ever bought from River Island and see whether they have a similar effect!
