There's a defining moment in Saturday Night Fever that puts you right inside the head of the main characters. It's not the tragedy on Brooklyn Bridge, or the great final dancing sequence. It's the scene where John Travolta's character Tony and his friend are having a heart-to-heart on a Brooklyn footpath. It's a poignant moment as Tony's friend tells him he can't fit in with Tony's gang no matter how hard he tries. Tony attempts in vain to console him as they stand face to face. His friend won't listen any more, he turns and walks away in tears. The camera pulls out and oh man, what are they? The poor guy is walking on huge 12-inch platform shoes. You want to laugh (in fact you do), but you know he's wearing them because he's too small and he wants to be as tall and as cool as the gang. It's at that point you know what chasing the disco fads of 1970s Brooklyn felt like. It was all about the shoes. Just like Dublin these days, really.
One by-product of our booming economy is that young people have more money to spend, more money to spend on big shoes. "You are your shoes!" the magazine ads seem to shriek as groups of louche youths in three-tier gold trainers glare out of the page at you. You should be wearing shoes a childrens' TV presenter wouldn't wear, in an array of zany colours that beggars belief. Shoegaze next time you're out at the weekend. They're everywhere, overbalancing at bars and stumbling after taxis every Friday and Saturday night. And that's just the guys.
Who knows what they're called. Radiohead's Thom Yorke wears them. You can get enormous blue and green leather ones, padded all the way around with a big ledge of rubber, making your feet look a few inches wider, and you a good few inches taller. It's hard to imagine a foot inside these little rubber tombs. Easier to walk in? I doubt it. A more forgiving shoe? No. The misbegotten platform shoe was originally put to rest in the 1980s, the decade in which Miami Vice hit our screens. It was a heady blend of crime-busting and exotic fashion ideas from head to toe. Feathery Duran Duran haircuts, long at the back. Cotton suits with rolled up sleeves and so on down to the foot area. No matter that Crockett and Tubs never stepped in a puddle for the entire eight years of that show. If it was good enough for Miami it was good enough. Back then it wasn't about big shoes, but little ones. Speedboats. Every guy in town wore speedboats - slip-on shoes with no laces. They were speedboats, simple, streamlined and black, your feet mere passengers as you pounded through the surf of a wet Friday night on the town, zipping past other speedboats out for the night. And why not? The 1980s were sleek, a time of bland pop music, shiny suits and minimalism in the foot region. Black shoes, offset perhaps with a white towelling sock, perhaps with no sock at all. Stirring times. A few short years later the speedboats were swept out to sea. The growth in popularity of football dove-tailed with Ireland's exploits in the World Cup to give us the trainer revolution. Born of practical concerns, this was fashion from the terraces. New lads needed shoes to kick a ball around in after watching the games, before heading to the clubs. A sports casual movement was born, and all kinds of suede trainers we might have remembered from the 1970s, and for a while it looked like the trainer might challenge the Doc Marten as the shoe at the foot of everyone's bed. Unfortunately even that had to end, and endless variations, vintage years and limited editions took the simple pleasure out of the thing. Now it had become a kind of obsessive hobby, a conversation starter, "new pre-skool Pumas!". People enthused breathlessly about their new pair. "What they are," they would gush, "is these mad old-skool drop-front Nikes with the full shell-toe and a mad good swoosh. . ."
So we've come the full-circle. These new big shoes are a cross between brightly coloured trainers and platforms, but fashionably leather just like the good old speedboat. Where has the simple shoe gone? Well, there's always good old-fashioned flip-flops. Not "stylish" ones by Converse or Nike, but the originals with the strap that sticks between your toes. No-one knows when they were issued or who made them, and there's only one colour: blue. You'll be able to wear them forever.
