Collecting is something that everybody does, whether you are aware of it or not. It can be opening your wallet and finding two weeks worth of hoarded train tickets from your commute to work. It might be opening your wardrobe and finding you have ten pairs of the same jeans that you never wear. Or coming back from a holiday with pockets full of receipts, leaflets, beer tops and other paraphernalia that no longer serves a purpose.

For myself, collecting has always been a way to satisfy a craving, that feeling of accomplishment, like when you complete a jigsaw puzzle or finish a book. It’s a trait of mine that I remember having from a very young age as I went about collecting anything from fruit stickers, train and bus tickets to postcards and using them to decorate my bedroom.

However, there has always been one item that I find myself particularly attached to and that’s shoes, (trainers to be specific), so much so that I distinctively remember my parents temporarily renaming me Imelda Marcos when I was a child. Now, I wouldn’t class myself as a ‘sneakerhead’ – I don’t keep my trainers clean and organised in their original boxes and I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of the newest Nike Airmax.

Nonetheless, when I buy a pair of trainers, it’s not something I take lightly. It’s a deep dive research mission, scouring online shoe websites, comparing prices and hunting down limited edition designs, in the hopes no one else will have it. Finding the perfect pair is a result of either an impulse purchase or a month-long saga of contemplation before a move is made, never anywhere in-between.

However, it wasn’t always that straightforward. As a young kid, my obsession with shoes wasn’t made any easier by the fact that I’ve always been a shoe size too small. The earliest memory I have of experiencing this downfall was going to Clarks when I was an infant to get my feet measured for school shoes. I would sit tentatively whilst the lady measured my feet and would be overcome with disappointment when they didn’t have the shoes with the dolly in the heel available for my size G feet.

You could say I had difficulty managing my expectations when it came to choosing the shoes I wanted. I didn’t want the ordinary and I didn’t want to be spotted in the playground with the same pair as all the other children. I wanted to stand out and in my eyes, footwear was the way to go.

As a junior, still floating between a size 1/2, all I desired was a pair of big kid trainers from Schuh, (prior to the ‘Schuh Kids’ range.) Many a Saturday was spent combing the shop, in a hopeful attempt to find the impossible. A feeling that has stuck with me to this day is the heartbreak, watching the member of staff walk out of the storeroom empty-handed, telling me to come back when I’d moved up a couple of sizes.

Another aspect of buying shoes that I struggle with greatly is decision fatigue. The last time my mum agreed to go shoe shopping with me was when I was a pre-teen and we went on a trip to London for half term. I was on the hunt for a pair of flip flops to take on a summer holiday we had planned and since we lived in a rural village in the North of England, Oxford Street was a big deal. Six hours of crippling indecision later and a glass of Pinot Grigio for mother, I was proudly cradling a pair of purple and lime green Havaianas flip flops.

 

For myself wanting to add to my collection of shoes is more of a fixation, something that occupies my mind meaning I will go to extra measures to achieve it. As museum professional Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes in ‘Objects of Memory: Material Culture as Life Review’:

 “Collections create their own frame of reference and offer the pleasures of control, order and relative closure within a hermetic universe.”

However, there are many other reasons to explain why people have an emotional attachment to objects and their collections, much more meaningful than mine. They serve as a point of reference whether they are left on a shelf or used in everyday life – as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, they are ‘intended to serve as a reminder of an ephemeral experience or absent person.’

Collections of objects are also important pieces of evidence served as a reminder of historical events. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Poland that holds the possessions belonging to the murdered Holocaust victims are among some of the most poignant in the world. Similarly, the discovery of the collation of Palaeolithic artwork created by prehistoric humans at The Lascaux Cave in France provides historians with an insight into what life as a human was like 20,000 years ago.

Collecting is what makes us human and allows us to illustrate a picture of the world for the people that come after us. I hope that one day I can pass down my shoe collection to the younger generations in my family and hope they appreciate the stress my mother went through to create it.