Searching for My Summer Sole Mate

Recently, I fulfilled a longtime dream of mine: I went shoe-shopping with a podiatrist.

Let me explain: I love sandals. They’re kind of my kryptonite—I covet them, I feel powerless against their pull. I want to specify that I am not generally a crazy shoe lady—but then Memorial Day comes, and my feet long to be free. My toes want to mingle with the summer air. My mom has said that she and I are “foot nudists”: The way I imagine nudists feel about letting it all hang out, she and I feel about bare or as-close-to-bare-as-possible feet.

I am not, however, a foot nudist who’s content to wear Birkenstocks or something similarly un-cute—I need sandals that look Italian and delicate and handcrafted. But sandals are a cruel mistress: The cuter they are, the more they hurt. It’s like that Anna Karenina quote: Comfortable sandals are all alike (ugly); every uncomfortable sandal is uncomfortable in its own way. Whether it’s irritation that results in an unsightly blister or lack of arch support or crisscross straps that cut up the bridge of my foot, every sandal I buy succeeds in finding a new way to mangle my extremities. By August, my feet and the rest of my body are exhausted and I still have at least two months of sandal-wearing to go.

So I decided to seek some professional help. I hoped against hope that looking at sandals with an actual medical specialist might finally free me from the cycle of open-toed misery.

Finding a podiatrist willing to shoe-shop with a journalist was going to be a challenge, and finding one who had good taste in footwear was a tall order indeed. But when Karen Langone, who has a podiatry practice in Southampton, New York, told me over the phone that lately she’s “big into kicking around in my Stan Smith sneakers,”—aka the Adidas worn by everyone from Kanye West to Brooklyn hipsters and currently, she noted, the most popular shoe in the world—I knew I’d found the woman for the job. We set up a time to meet in Manhattan at Bloomingdale’s. (Langone thought it had a better selection than Macy’s.)

We started on the outermost edges of the over-air-conditioned shoe salon, that archipelago of carpeted islands populated by every variety of shoe, each isle with its own topography of racks and boxes and fabulous footwear. We began by appraising the selection of Sam Edelmans. Langone frequently advises her patients on picking shoes, so she is full of tips. “One thing to always do is to buy your shoes at the end of the day because at the end of the day your feet are going to ... ”—she paused to consider the shoe she was holding—“swell and expand. If anything is problematic, you’re probably going to notice it more by the end of the day.” A practicing podiatrist for 28 years, Langone is petite with short hair. She’s a lot like your mom—if your mom’s opinions about Uggs were backed up by medical science. (The boots offer no support whatsoever, she said. The company’s sandals don’t look half bad, though.) Her intuition about footwear is more than intuition; it’s almost a Spidey sense: After I admitted that the Vans’ slip-ons I was wearing weren’t as comfortable as I had hoped, she diagnosed the problem with a single glance: They were a little wide for me in the back.

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Author: Heather Schwedel