A fascinating request for comment went around Response Source  this morning from Simon Brooke, one of my favourite freelancers. It said:

“I’m writing a piece for the Financial Times about the current trend for brightly coloured shoes for men… It would be someone who is a shoe fan but thinks that gold, bright blue or shocking pink footwear is just too much and that guys will never go for them. “

The truth of the matter that innovation and the male shoe have never made comfortable bedfellows. In fact, time was that your choice of shoe made a very definite statement about what you did in bed. Wearing suede shoes, for example, was a signal that when it came to love, you preferred the kind “that dare not speak its name”. And so rebellious was the act of wearing leather’s furrier cousin on your feet, that it used to get you expelled from Oxford or Cambridge universities.

Sexual politics may have moved on since then, but men’s footwear has stayed conservative, sloughing off numerous false dawns, including: -

• The platform shoe  – rendered forever unacceptable by Rodney Bewes wearing them in repeats of The Likely Lads
• The mandal (male sandal) – for every Russell Crowe in Gladiator there have been 100 beard-wearing real ale enthusiasts called Geoff
• The Croc – wearing a colander on your feet is not – and never will be – a hot look
• The medge (male wedge) – a stillborn innovation. Let us never speak of it again

So while it’s possible to get temporarily excited about Kurt Geiger’s range of rainbow driving shoes, metallic oxford lace-ups (though Hedi Slimane was doing this for Dior Homme in 2003, so it’s not that current) and the ruby slipper-inspired pointy dress shoe that Office sells EVERY Christmas, let’s not call an end to conservatism just yet.

For one thing, colourful shoes can have a dampening effect on the rest of your wardrobe. They often compel you to tone the rest of your outfit down for fear that those sky-blue loafers will make you look like you’ve joined the Circus of Cuban Pimps. Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross might be able to get away with them, but they’ve made a living from dressing up like Christmas trees with a Y chromosome, and most of us haven’t. Catwalk aside, men’s fashion still lives in mortal fear of trying too hard, and looking too different.

It’s therefore no surprise that fashion brands try to foist these things on male shoppers every couple of years and they overwhelmingly end up in the sale racks, snapped up for a song by Christmas partygoers, off-duty drag queens and low-rent cabaret performers (myself included). The novelty shoe is the opposite of a puppy. It’s not for life, but it might do for Christmas.