The descent of Canadian media: when shoes trump budget announcements
Usually I like Pete McMartin’s columns in the Vancouver Sun, but this past week, his sense of judgment was way off, and I really had to wonder if poor old Pete’s sense of dollar value had calcified somewhere in the last decade, or if he just didn’t have a clue about the reality of women’s fashions. For my non-Canadian readers, a little context first. There is a quaint Canadian tradition whereby on the day that a new budget gets unveiled, the Finance Minister wears new shoes. For years, Finance Minister after Finance Minister would show the smooth bottom of his (always a him) new, generally black loafers, to the media. Now, we have Carole Taylor, former chair of the CBC and now the Provincial Liberal Party Finance Minister for British Columbia. By virtue of being neither a him, nor dowdy, she seems to be targeted for her footwear choices, at the cost of obscuring whatever is going on in the provincial budget.
At this week’s budget unveiling, Taylor chose to wear a pair of Fluevog Teapot Darjeelings. Green for economic prosperity and environmental responsibility. Fluevog as a Canadian company, and a choice that shows her to . A good choice, I thought. What is interesting is to see Pete McMartin falling victim to what I think of as American tabloid mentality – an entire column devoted to what he perceives as Carole Taylor’s inappropriate shoe choice. He mentions several times that he is spitting up wine reading about her shoes because they supposedly cost $249. (I checked the Fluevog site, and they’re currently on sale for $149, but I digress.) He had suggested she buy something from one of the local big box stores, something less pricey, something pedestrian, to use his words. Well, there are a few bones I have to pick with his argument, starting with the price.
Any of the shoes I’ve seen in the big box stores have been questionable-quality leather, imported from China, and likely made in a sweatshop there (Fluevogs are made in fair-wage facilities in western Europe). They have no support for the mature female foot, and women that buy them usually do so because they follow fashion trends, and intend to get rid of them after a season. Smart adult shoppers invest in good quality shoes (because I need orthotics, I favour Naot shoes, also around the $200 mark) that will last us more than a year.
So I don’t think the price of Taylor’s shoes was outrageous for a woman of her standing. If she’d worn $49 pumps from Payless, there would no doubt have been a hue and cry from the female reporters about how incredibly tackily she was dressed. I can see the column now: Taylor can’t even afford decent shoes on her salary – prediction of economic gloom in the province? And one doesn’t have to be middle class to have a pair of Fluevogs. When I think of the Fluevog wearers I know, they’re often students who invest in a good pair of fashionable yet comfortable shoes as a fashion statement, instead of having a half-dozen pair of cheap shoes that fall apart after a season’s wear.
And Pete, where were all your columns on the cost of the shoes the previous Finance Ministers wore? Now, it’s been a long time since I dated guys, but the my last relationship was with someone in that socio-economic range, and I know what he paid for shoes, back in the 1980s, and it was at par with women’s shoes, even back then. Just because they were boring black loafers that you couldn’t identify closely enough to look up the prices of on a website, don’t think that the previous Finance Ministers were shlumping around in $49 specials, either. But we never found out, because oh gosh, you were talking about their budgets instead of their shoes.
It’s often a lose-lose-lose proposition for any woman in the public eye. No matter what Taylor would wear, she would get slammed by someone. That’s the way it has always worked. Distract the public by commenting on their wardrobe. If not that, pick on their hair or make-up. If that doesn’t work, go for the weight. Claiming they lost or gained a few pounds will get them every time. It’s also ironic that Pete McMartin disparages the shoes as “exactly like the kind of indestructible footwear middle-aged tap-dancing instructors wear in class” - obviously out of touch with the last decade of fashion, there, Pete - which suggests to me that he’d rather have seen her in something more feminine, yet last year, I believe he slammed her for ultra-feminine Guccis she wore the year before.
I suppose I expected more – in fact, way more – from Pete McMartin, as he’s one of the columnists I actually like. This time, though, I think he’s out of touch with the double-standard that women have to live by. (For example, I dry-clean a woman’s shirt, it costs me 30% more than to dry-clean a man’s shirt. I buy a pair of running shoes in the women’s department, it costs me way more than those same shoes in the boy’s department – never mind that trainers, trainers, are well over $100 if you want any kind of support in them. And I suspect that even at that price, they’re manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, as well; try to find a pair that isn’t. But I digress.) Heck, if I were allowed to wear heels, I would buy a pair of Teapot Darjeelings, too.
And my advice to Carole Taylor? Next year, get a pair of men’s black loafers, preferably similar to those worn by previous Finance Ministers. The journalists will still comment on your shoes, but they’ll also have to figure out how to justify why they didn’t complain about the shoes of your predecessors Gary Collins and Colin Hansen. Actually, Fluevog has a pair that looks a lot like what your male counterparts probably wear, without media mention. They’re called Capitalist T.S.E., and cost only $295.