I was born with feet in the 1st percentile of the population and they stayed that way even despite getting taller. Now every shoe shopping experience is awkward af.
I was born with feet in the 1st percentile of the population and they stayed that way even despite getting taller. Now every shoe shopping experience is awkward af.
As a woman, I think it’s stupid that shoes are gendered in the first place. My shoe size is in the realm that exists for both men’s and women’s shoes. So in shoe stores I can grab the same sneakers from the women’s and the men’s section. Just sort the damn shoes by size and let people pick the ones they like ffs.
The first few decades of my life I assumed that there’d been all sorts of important orthopaedic/podiatry research done into the difference between men and women’s feet, gaits etc that meant wearing sports shoes sold as “women’s” would in some way cause my feet long term harm. Nope, it was bullshit marketing all along.
I wouldn’t be surprised if on average women’s feet were narrower than men’s, but even if that’s the case, just make narrow and wide versions of shoes and let people pick the ones that fit their feet. Surely there are men with narrow feet and women with wide feet. It just makes no sense.
I have had to wear shoes 1 (or .5 depending upon the model) number larger due to wide fronts.
Barefoot shoes! Started wearing them 2 years ago and will never go back. I hadn’t even realized how much regular shoes crammed my toes together until I started wearing actually foot-shaped shoes. And my feet are narrow.
I recently learned that there’s a size rating for width. It goes from A to E, and says something about the length/width ratio of the shoe. Made my previous shoes a lot easier to buy (I also struggle to find wide enough shoes).
Well, guess I need to look for my width rating.
Not that it matters, because the shop ppl won’t understand.
And even if they do, it’s useless if they don’t have what I need.
Goes further than that, my feet are technically 11EEEEEE but I usually have to get a 12EE since basically no one in the world makes 6E if not custom made.
Not just shoes, all clothes. We can come up with better terms, like tapered or straight line. Whatever would be most descriptive. It’s ridiculous.
To be fair, I don’t think it’s “ridiculous” to sort e.g. jeans into the broad categories of “typically wider or slipper hips/thighs compared to length” or t-shirts into “typically broader back vs. typically larger chest”.
The mens/women’s categories are probably the coarsest categories that makes sense, since the average man’s and women’s body are so different in so many ways.
The point is that you described it exactly as it could be described without using gendered terms.