tim's experiment

My mobile phone is getting a bit past its sell-by date. I can browse the internet at home or in the office, but it frequently announces “no connection” when on the MTR. So I am forced back to the ancient habit of surreptitiously observing my fellow passengers.

This is not as interesting as it used to be. There is no visible variety in what people are doing – more than nine out of ten have their noses in their mobile phones. There are some clues to different activities: people with earphones are watching movies, people with frantically active thumbs are playing games, people who look depressed are probably reading the news…

Having exhausted these rather meagre possibilities I moved down to feet and made a surprising discovery. The shoe wars are over. Competition to flatter your feet has finished. Everyone – often whole carriages offer no exceptions – now wears trainers.

I do not criticise, I only observe. This is a highly practical trend and a triumph for practicality over convention.

Still it seems a bit surprising that it has largely escaped comment. When I was a kid a shoe was a leather thing with a sole, an upper and a lace. One of the first things you learned at about the same time as you learned to talk was how to tie a bow.

Every household had a shoe polishing kit, or rather two shoe polishing kits because you had to have one for brown shoes and one for black ones, with a separate pot of coloured polish and two brushes – one for applying and one for polishing off. Brown and black were the only acceptable colours for men’s shoes.

Shoes for sporting purposes that you could wear in the street came in two varieties: gym shoes – white canvas uppers and rubber soles – and basketball boots – the same but running up the ankle a few inches. Shoes for games played on grass could not be used for everyday wear because they had studs or spikes.

Skinheads and other flouters of convention could wear “work boots”, which had more ankle protection and often also had reinforced toe caps. Students wore things called “Hush Puppies”, which were laceless and made in a durable suede-like material which did not need polishing. A lazy choice.

As a young sports reporter who spent a lot of time standing in wet fields I was pleased to discover that in Lancashire you could still buy clogs. These were not like Dutch clogs, which are carved from a single piece of wood – Lancashire clogs have a leather upper and a thick wooden sole, usually fortified with a sheet of rubber or a sort of metal horseshoe stuck to the bottom.

And that was it. I am not sure where the trainer thing came from. It appears, though the memoirs of Phil Knight are not very forthcoming about this, that it started with flashy basketball shoes. Then the young person in the street discovered trainers, which were initially simply intended to allow serious runners to run in the street for practice. 

Clearly trainers are now worn by people who have not spent a lot of time training recently, to put it politely. They have become part of the local male’s unofficial uniform, along with long shorts, a tee-shirt and a backpack.

I suppose the trainer habit is a great improvement for women, who used to be expected to wear uncomfortable and even dangerous shoes in the interests of elegance. You rarely see high heels these days, except in Central at lunchtime.

I suspect that even those ladies who are expected or required to wear high heels at work do not travel in them. They either keep the shoes in the office or take them back and forth in a bag and wear something practical on the bus.

In the light of this it seems odd that a few places are still using footwear as a sign of respectability.

When I first came to Hong Kong one of our more prestigious department stores still had a sign at the entrance saying “No Slippers”. This was a puzzle – slippers in the UK are those soft things you wear only indoors. I later learned that many older or more traditional Hongkongers still wore the sort of slippers sported by Bruce Li in his more historical films – a black lightweight slip-on usually paired with white socks – and this was the local “slipper”. The sign was a way of saying, as Basil Fawltey might have put it, “no riff-raff”. Or to put it in more sociological terms, “no poor people, thank you.”

Any institution which refuses to admit people wearing trainers is in danger of being regarded as trying to say the same thing. 

We should perhaps, before hot-footing it away from this topic, consider the implications of the change from shoes, usually made of leather, to trainers, often made of plastic.

You would think that leather would be plentiful and environmentally neutral because the meat industry produces a steady stream of unwanted cow parts, of which the skin is one. It has been suggested that some ranching in Brazil is encouraged by the market for leather, but this seems implausible. As with so many commodities the price paid to the producer of the raw material is a very small part of the eventual cost.

A more serious complaint about leather is that the production process is polluting – tanning factories also stink – and unless care is taken poisonous for the workers. A lot of leather production takes place in countries which are not known for worker safety.

On the other hand a cared-for pair of leather shoes will last for a long time, with occasional running repairs. Unfortunately in a fashion-conscious society that may be regarded as a drawback.