At 61, I Owned Two Kinds Of Sandals. The Ones That Hurt, And The Ones I Was Embarrassed By.

A note from a reader about the sandals from a small Australian boutique that finally stopped making her choose between her feet and her outfit.

There is a shelf in my wardrobe that tells the whole story. On the left, the sandals I can walk in. On the right, the sandals I actually like. Those two groups have never once been the same pair.

You know exactly the shelf I mean. The comfortable ones are wide, flat, the colour of a bandage, and they make a perfectly nice dress look like something you put on to go to an appointment. The pretty ones are a thin sole and a prayer, and by the second hour you are doing sums about how far away the car is.

So you take the pretty ones and you suffer, or you take the comfortable ones and spend the day feeling like you have given up on something. For the longest time I did not realise there was a third option, because nobody was making one.

Three weeks ago my sister turned up to lunch in a pair from Perth Boutique and I spent the whole meal looking at her feet instead of listening to her.

What they are

The pair I ordered is a black espadrille wedge. An open toe with a wide band across the front, so nothing cuts across the knuckles of your toes, and an ankle strap with a proper buckle so you set it once and it stays set. No slipping, no gripping with your toes to keep it on, which I had not realised I was doing until I stopped.

The sole is the part that matters. It is a platform wedge wrapped in jute, which means the whole foot is lifted rather than just the heel, so your weight sits where it always did instead of being tipped forward onto the ball of your foot. You get the height and the line of a heel without the hour three problem.

Underneath there is a contoured footbed with real cushioning in it, so the pavement stops arriving quite so hard.

But here is the part I did not expect.

They are sold as orthopaedic sandals, and they do not look like orthopaedic sandals.

The black pair. Mine have barely been off since.

I did not want a shoe that forgave me for having feet. I wanted one I would have picked anyway, that happened to be kind. That is a much rarer thing than it should be.

What happened at my nephew’s wedding

The real test came a fortnight later, at my nephew’s wedding. Outdoors, on grass, then a reception on a hard floor, then the long walk back to the car in the dark.

I have spent every wedding of the last decade with a pair of flats in my handbag. I did not take them. I stood for the photographs, I was on my feet through the whole of the drinks, and I danced to two songs, which my husband will tell you is two more than usual.

Nothing. No burning under the ball of the foot, no ache up the back of the calf, no quiet negotiating with myself about when I could reasonably sit down.

“You have had those on since two o’clock,” my sister said at the end of the night, which from her is a scientific finding.

→ See the sandal collection

What changed in three weeks

I was not looking to be fashionable. You quietly lower that bar to neat, and then again to clean and comfortable, and eventually you stop expecting a shoe to do anything at all except not hurt. What surprised me is that this one did both without asking me to compromise on either.

Three things I noticed, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. The platform is the trick. A heel tips you forward and puts everything on the front of your foot. A wedge of the same height lifts the whole foot together. You get the look of a heel and your feet never find out.

2. The straps do the work. A wide front band spreads the pressure instead of cutting a line across your toes, and the buckle at the ankle means your foot is held rather than balanced. I have not curled my toes once.

3. They go with what I already own. I have worn the same pair with a summer dress to a wedding and with cropped trousers to the shops, and both times they looked like a decision rather than a compromise.

There are more than fifty styles in the collection, which I will admit I went through twice. Flat sandals, slides, wedges, a low block heel, loafers. Most of them are around the same price, so the choice is about what you like rather than what you can justify.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me. Seventy-nine ninety-nine did not sound like enough for a shoe that does all of that. So I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down what this problem has actually cost me over the years.

• The “comfort” sandals I wore twice because of how they looked, $120
• The pretty pair I could not walk from the car park in, $165
• Gel pads for the pretty pair, which did not save them, $35
• The flats I carried in my handbag to every wedding, $60
• A pair from the sandal collection, $79.99

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …how long have I been doing this??

They are a small boutique selling directly, which is most of the answer, and the rest is that it is on sale. Most of the collection is $79.99 instead of $159.00, which is half price, and the discount stacks if you take more than one pair.

What I’d tell you if we were friends

If you were sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea and you asked me whether you should order a pair, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that if you have a shelf like mine, the problem was never your feet. It was that comfortable shoes have been designed for decades as though the women wearing them had stopped caring what they looked like, and that is simply not true and never was.

I would tell you to go for the wedge rather than the flat if you have ever liked a bit of height, because it is the thing that genuinely surprised me and I would not have picked it myself.

I would tell you to order two. Not because I want you spending money, but because the discount stacks — two is ten per cent off, three is fifteen, four is twenty — and because I ordered one to test the theory and have since gone back twice.

And I would tell you that delivery is free anywhere in Australia and there are thirty days to send them back, so the whole thing costs you nothing but the trouble of walking around your own kitchen in them, which is the only fitting that has ever told me the truth anyway.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been choosing between your feet and the rest of the outfit, please do not leave it another summer.

The shelf on the left can go. Mine has.

— Maggie