Sartorial starting points

When you are shopping for clothes, where do you begin? What's your starting point?

I have a few important factors to take into consideration, but leading the fray by a country mile are my feet.

I have feet like Jeremy Fisher's —

— soft and bendy like all the rest of me, unresisting, easily blistered and immensely long and shallow.

It's no good buying footwear from regular retailers for people with big feet, because those shoes are about an inch deeper than my feet and have stiffening in the toecaps that bruises me. They rub my feet into sores and the back of the heel comes up well past where the corresponding bit on my foot runs out. Useless.

There are two firms I can rely on for shoes that fit me: Gabor and Vivobarefoot. 

Of the Gabors, I can only have the slides, and boots with no heels and a spatulate toe shape. If I wear heels — even 3cm — my foot just slides down and forms a squashed heap in the toe box. If I have a closed toe in a shoe I get bruises (wearing boots holds my feet in place provided there's no heel). If there are straps and buckles, I get blisters. Even the slides, in the softest of leathers, give me blisters, but at least that's only on the sides of my toes so I can stick plasters on.

Of the Vivos, I have to wear the men's — none of the ladies' come up long enough. I can't wear Vivo boots because my ankles aren't strong enough to fight back against the enclosing fabric of the boot. So I wear their lightest mesh running shoes, which are flexible enough to work with my feet. These —

That has to be my starting point.

So if I wear a dress, it must look believable with these shoes —  

(I know, I know, I shouldn't put outdoor shoes on the bed like that, but hey). 

A dress looks okay with slides — these are my Gabor slides —

— but if I do that, either the dress has to be very long or look credible with leggings under it; because the same Jeremy Fisher oddities that determined my feet affect my whole vascular system, with the result that fluid pools in my ankles and I have a splendid network of varicose veins. In my childhood, no self-respecting woman stepped out of her front door with bare legs. Now it's the other way round, and wearing tights with sandals is utterly scorned. Awkward for me.

There's a certain Agatha Christie look one can achieve with a rather old-fashioned, retro-style summer dress or a tweed skirt ending just below the knee. 

One can go for an Amish style, but I can't face the incorporation of the inexorable southerly slide of the torsal appendages into this look, and I won't tolerate the kind of foundation wear that hurts your liver and alters your breathing. 

You surely see the problem. The disconcerting bolster effect, proving that it's possible to make an Empire line out of anything with a waist.

There's a flowing, arty look that used to be my stock-in-trade, but I've found that the more my own actual body becomes increasingly deconstructed with the passing years, the less becomingly a deconstructed dress droops from the concave chest and rounded shoulders. Like Auntie Vera of the 1960s Giles cartoons, for those of you with long memories.

So I mainly stick to trousers. I love dresses, so I do keep valiantly trying. I probably need Muriel Whitchurch and Miss Gossage from St Trinians as role models (that would be Margaret Rutherford and Joyce Grenfell). 

Or else that other, inimitable Vera (Stanhope) —

One of the lessons I have unfortunately taken all too much to heart from my religion, is that one should never, ever give up hope. Which, when it comes to dresses, can be expensive. Still, you never know do you?

I kept the disastrous beautiful dresses that were taken for dressing gowns btw. They make good nighties in the very hot weather, after all. And what's wrong with looking beautiful in the night?