Holidaymakers Choose Shoe-Worshipping
Posted: Friday, December 12, 2008
by Matthew Sims
http://www.gluvfootwear.co.uk
SHOEAHOLICS are shunning traditional hotspots such as Hawaii , Dubai and Barbados as shoe-worshipping overtakes sun-worshipping in holiday appeal.
Such is their obsession for shoes, many women are tailoring their annual getaway so that they can continue to pay homage to their footwear devotion even when they are on holiday.
The old adage of sun, sea, and sand now has an extra ingredient shoes.
If ever there was proof that shoe worship is no longer a minority cult, but a mainstream devotion, it is the recent opening by a popular New York store of a shoe department so large that it has its own postal code.
The new 8,500-square-foot floor in upscale Fifth Avenue store stocks 10,000 pairs of designer shoes, a VIP room for private shoe shopping and an in-house cobbler.
After a month of discussions with the United States Postal service, it agreed to customise the last four digits of the store's 10022 ZIP code, adding the word 'SHOE' - it's the first time a single floor has ever received its own designated code.
But it's not just New York shoe shops that feature on travellers' itineraries the Philippines and Canada are also seeing an upturn in visitors.
The Mankina City Footwear Museum in Manila celebrates the shoe obsession of Imelda Marcos and is one of the country's fastest-growing attractions.
In 1986, when she and her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, fled the poverty-stricken Philippines , they left a treasure trove of excessive shopping in their wake. An inventory of her wardrobe revealed 508 floor-length gowns, 888 handbags, 71 pairs of sunglasses and famously - 1,200 pairs of shoes.
More than 20 years later, the public fascination with her enormous stash of shoes (which included a pair fitted with batteries that sparkled in the dark) remains undimmed.
Imelda took the logical step and in 2001 opened the museum to display hundreds of the shoes discovered in the presidential palace.
"They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but thank God, all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes," she explained at the time.
The museum has proved to be a huge success, attracting thousands of tourists to gawp at her footwear, which includes the black espadrilles she wore fleeing Manila in disgrace on board a US military helicopter in 1986.
But even this museum pales into relative insignificance when compared to the attributes of the Beta Shoe Museum in Canada .
The museum celebrates the style and function of footwear in four impressive galleries. Footwear on display ranges from Chinese bound foot shoes and ancient Egyptian sandals to chestnut-crushing clogs and glamorous platforms.
Over 4,500 years of history and a collection of 20th-century celebrity shoes are reflected in the semi-permanent exhibition, All About Shoes . Three other galleries feature changing exhibitions, so there is always something new to see.
The Toronto museum boasts a collection of more than 12,000 different shoes Famous shoes on display include Olympian Michael Johnson's gold running shoes, shoes belonging to Imelda Marcos, Princess Diana, Elton John, Marilyn Monroe, and Bob Hope.
The opportunity to rub shoulders or should that be toes with the rich and famous is holds strong appeal for our growing population of shoeaholics!
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