Ugg Boots

From Varsity 15 February 2008


On the whole I try not to read the fashion pages, let alone write them. They’ve always seemed to me to be a frustrating combination of the inane and the hurtful, sprinkled gently with the visually depressing. Each picture of somebody beautiful wearing a brown coat is another beautiful person wearing a brown coat that isn’t me, or even wanting to step out to the pictures with me, which is the perennially acceptable alternative. Fashion pages, in general, are to my mind the print equivalent of having a big mirror above my bed, emblazoned with the lyrics from Ludacris’ 2002 hit ‘Move Bitch’.
Aside from anything else, fashion pages imply that there might be something wrong with the way I’m presently dressed, which is a nasty thought from which only bad things can come. Appearance, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder (a fact convincingly reiterated by provincial dancefloors and the continued employment of David Schwimmer), and I like to think it’s all a matter of personal taste, like how you take your fried eggs (on the chin, in my case).
Unfortunately, Ugg boots are terrible. I know this because I have seen them, frequently, adorning the feet of girls (and one boy) who ought to know better. Footwear, like many of the more basic innovations, occurs because it is appropriate to its environment. Football boots, for instance, are popular amongst people playing, or at least intending to play, football. In the same vein flippers are used more often by people swimming than people walking on dry land.
The Ugg boot, according to Wikipedia, the well-known shapeshifting encyclopaedia, was invented in Australia by sheep farmers, who had both ready access to sheep and very infrequent contact with other people, other people who might notice that they had a mammoth’s muff strapped to each ankle. Later on the boots were adopted by fighter pilots, who had a need for warmth in an unpressurized environment, and for whom other people were also less of a problem (I suppose it could be argued that in many ways ‘other people’ are the problem if you’re a fighter pilot. Them and missiles).
None of these factors is applicable to the modern high street, which has both a proliferation of other people and also a marked absence of sheep and missiles. And although it can get really quite crowded of a Christmastime Saturday afternoon, Topshop still has a little way to go before it matches the climatic extremes of, say the Australian outback, or the Korean War. Wearing an Ugg boot in a modern, urban environment, with its wealth of other possible footwear choices, says four things of the wearer:
a) I am not only a sheep, I am, like, wearing one.
b) I have too high a disposable income for someone of my taste and judgement.
c) I have not yet learned to fully appreciate the gift of sight.
Still, it’s difficult to know exactly what to do to fix the issue. My original plan was to blind everyone who owned a pair, until it was pointed out to me that not being able to see would make it more difficult to dress oneself, and so the easy to slip-on Uggs would gain ground. My second was to invest in a pair myself in a fit of self-serving hypocrisy. The third was to ignore them, and hope they will eventually go away.