These Boots Are Made for Walking

Every now and then an item of clothing or an accessory renders itself vulnerable to the "kitchen sink" treatment on the part of the fashion industry. I made this point once to my fashion team in America, and after they had put down their Coke Zeros and their bags of Haribo candies and shrieked with laughter, I found myself having to translate that particular Britishism to "overload," overwrought or simply "over the top." Handbags, or "It" bags as they then became, are an excellent case in point. Once an It bag was simply a nice, new handbag, with maybe (and only sometimes) a tiny shiny logo hidden about its person or displayed prominently, depending upon its genesis (the former being more likely Gucci, the latter perhaps Hermès). And then almost by osmosis (for which read advertising, gifting to fashion editors and celebrity endorsement), more and more women were attracted to similar sorts of handbags, which led in turn to more of "those" sort of handbags being created. As if that wasn't enough, once almost every fashion and accessories house on the planet had rationalized that producing "that sort of handbag" was a license to print money, they engaged in the Darwinian task of applying more and more metaphorical plumage to the handbags, in the form of buckles, zips, padlocks and key chains ("look at me, buy me"), so as to render them less the sort of thing Lady Bracknell might have favored and more the type of kit bag your plumber might haul into your home to fix the downstairs bath. Perhaps a scientific analysis of the "kitchen sinkism" of fashion is not required? After all, we have seen the same thing happen to jeans, to watches and to shoes. It seems to me that the determining or causal factor in this equation might simply be greed. By piling more "stuff" onto the aforementioned handbags and by creating them in increasingly rare materials (hornback crocodile anyone?), fashion and accessories houses were able to make a market wherein the more elaborate and exclusive the constituents, the more desirous and expensive the item. I mention the It bag as a specific example because the same thing appears to be happening to the humble boot.