There’s been a bit of a rock’n’roll theme in some of my fellow bloggers’ posts lately and it chimed in neatly with a strange and sudden yearning to get myself a pair of… you may think I’m mad, but… a pair of creepers.
Well, I was looking through one of my sketchbooks from the early 1980s and found these small drawings…
…and, I dunno why, but I got hooked on the idea of slipping my feet into a pair of crepe-soled shoes, at least before I get too much older. Can a woman of my age get away with wearing such things, with narrow jeans and a leopard print coat? Do I care? Hmm...I don’t want to end up like one of those old ladies who should have given up the lipstick and leather decades beforehand - there are always one or two in every town, aren’t there? - and who turn heads for completely the wrong reasons. But I think - ok: hope - there’s still time for me to make a few last stands against middle-aged convention.
At least I can buy them off the internet now too. Back at the time of my little drawings, purchasing such exotic items meant taking the train down to London and heading for the rather cramped and gloomy branch of Shelly’s at Foubert’s Place in Carnaby Street. Inside, boxes of weird and wonderful footwear for all of us who wanted to make fashion statements with our tootsies were stacked precariously and in no obviously logical arrangement from floor to ceiling. In Shelly’s I indulged my love of some black patent lace-up boots with impossibly pointy toes, not the sort of thing you could buy in a small town Stead & Simpsons at the time. It was my boyfriend who bought the creepers then – purple ones, red ones, some with pointy toes too - to be accessorised with dayglo green or pink socks, which we could also only find in the city shops (far too outrageous for the provinces).
You didn’t have to be into traditional rock’n’roll to wear creepers. Early ‘80s fashion seemed, to me anyway, to be mostly about hybrids. It was natural to mix and match various influences: a bit of punk here, a bit of glam there, a mélange of several different decades' styles, combining kitsch with chic and old with new. I had no qualms about wearing a yellow polka dot 1950s dress under a leather motorbike jacket, along with black woolly tights and monkey boots, for instance. And, when I think about it, there were a lot of hybrid inspirations in the musical backdrop of the time too. Rockabilly earned new credibility with bands like the Polecats and the Stray Cats...
(Who couldn't fall in love with Brian Setzer's hair too?)
Anyway, the creepers are on order and I just hope I’ll like them when they get here. At least if I find I'm not brave enough to wear them out I can Stray Cat Strut round the living room in them and pretend I'm seventeen again...
