Ewa Szypula goes on holiday and discovers a whole new meaning to ‘ethical shopping’…
On a recent holiday visiting friends in Catalonia, I noticed that my (male) friend was wearing an exceptionally beautiful pair of shoes. They looked like dancers’ shoes: sort of like espadrilles, very simply made, dirty-white canvas, shapely, and with a pair of ribbons to tie at the ankle. Ballet shoes for grown-ups. The fact that it was a guy wearing them made me want them even more: they were unpretentious, non-girly, non-showy, unisex chic.
As someone who was never particularly good at dancing – and yet continued to do ballet on and off into adulthood just because I liked the outfits so much (think anything from those traditional white Swan Lake dresses to that whole Jean Paul Gautier 1976 ‘grungy ballerina’ thing) – I found myself a little bit in love, with those shoes that seemed to evoke all those things and yet which were totally unique in their own right. (And as someone who already owns far too many nice things, I don’t have these crushes so often these days. This was serious.)
I expressed my delight in my friend’s shoes. I was told that they were traditional Catalonian footwear from the Empordà region, where we were, and they were called espardenyes (or, in Spanish, alpargatas). That particular pair, he said, he had got himself to wear at his own wedding. He warned me that they weren’t readily available everywhere.
We had a go at finding the shoes, with no success. It seems that we could get hold of another version of them – Catalan espadrilles made entirely out of ribbon – which still had that attractive tie-at-the-ankle bit, but which lacked the special simplicity of the canvas version.
For my friend, my shoes became a personal crusade. We went into shoe shops at every opportunity, and asked everywhere for the traditional espardenyes. We went to Figueres, the birthplace of Salvador Dali, to the shop where Dali had his own espardenyes bought for him as a child. (My friends even unearthed a photo of a five-year-old Dali – wearing MY SHOES!)
It was in that shop that someone was finally able to advise us: they used to sell the special espardenyes until the previous year, but they don’t stock them regularly any more. There is only one guy in Catalonia who still makes the special shoes, and he lives in a village just outside of Barcelona. The problem is, the shop lady told me, that it is actually difficult to place an order with him because he only works when he wants to. If he doesn’t feel like making any shoes in a given month, then he won’t bother with your order. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
Damn, I thought; now I want them even more. An independent shoemaker, living in a beautiful place, who works nicely at his own pace and only when he can be arsed? I mean, talk about ethical shopping. If only I could get all my shoes from him, then the continued exploitation of third-world child workers in factories in places like Bangladesh would no longer have to be such a daily burden on my soul.
I didn’t find the special canvas espardenyes. But I did walk away with a pair of the standard Catalan espardenyes made entirely out of ribbons, bought from the same place where Dali got his shoes – and, happily, handmade in Catalonia.
