It's not the shoes themselves as such that induce this vitriol. I don't like them but each to their own - just so long as the wearer remembers that shoes are neither shorthand nor substitute for an actual personality. It's the culture (and I use the word loosely) of worship that has built up around them, which is all just a bit too Here Come The Girls on their tacky "liberating" hen do, that drives me crazy.
The ubiquitous inferences to girls (never women) and their love of shoes that have infiltrated every aspect of pop culture are patronising and insulting. Not to mention boring, predictable, and lazy. Declaring an infatuation with Louboutins verging on the unhinged is a quick way for people who know literally nothing about fashion (and confuse it with shopping) to, in their own minds, identify themselves to each other as wild-living vixens with an admirable taste for luxury.
These are the same desperately mediocre people that foam at the mouth over cocktails, carry their lunch and their Jodie Picoult paperback to work in Jane Norman carrier bags, and think that Diet Coke adverts featuring puppets in high heels dancing on desks (because working and using your brain is like, so boring!) say something about their lives without seeing any irony whatsoever in that fact.
