All Women Love Shoes

Aisles and aisles of shoes!

"You ask me why I need
Thirty-two pairs of shoes to wear
You seem to ask me why I got a lot of things
It's just a chick thing
You oughta let it go"

— No Secrets, "That's What Girls Do"

In the world of fiction, all women adore shoes. Not only that, they judge people by the shoes they wear, have whole closets full of them, know of every single designer, and no matter how expensive or painful to wear, they simply must have the latest styles for the season and/or take advantage of last season's clearance sale. Don't question this; this is simply one of those Women's Mysteries that men will never understand.

For some reason, whenever a woman's massive shoe collection is shown onscreen, they are always high heels like in the picture, as if a woman would never own one or more pairs of sneakers, flip-flops, ballet flats, or anything else without heels. It's probably just that high heels drive home the femininity of this trope (compare, on this point, Mars and Venus Gender Contrast). Alternately, it may be because heels tend to be more glamorous, leading to at least a few impulse buys.

There's also the fact that women's fashion is considerably more complex than men's. A man can do just fine with a single pair of dark dress shoes and a pair or two of casual sneakers; anything more is at his discretion. For a woman, a dress or skirt shorter than ankle length needs matching footwear or else the visual elements will clash. When that dress can be just one of a huge range of styles and colors, this demands a wide range of footwear options to go with them. Even after all this, she would still need sneakers for physical activity, sandals or flats for leisure, etc. Put simply, women's fashion needs more shoe options.

Of course, plenty of women in real life are not that interested in fashion, or dress in ways that allow them to roll around in a cute but comfy pair of shoes. Some women who love fashion may just prefer to have a pair or two of versatile shoes that can work with multiple outfits. Some women are disabled and have to be careful about the shoes they wear regardless of their fashion sense (of course this doesn't apply to all disabilities and can be different for people who even have the same condition). Unfortunately, any woman in fiction not interested in owning three dozen pairs of shoes is painted as a tomboy regardless of her reasoning. For a Tomboy with a Girly Streak, don't be surprised to find a few heels along with her boots, sneakers, track spikes, etc.

Compare Distracted by the Luxury, Unlimited Wardrobe, Girls Love Stuffed Animals. Contrast Prefers Going Barefoot. It should be noted that the fetishization of bare feet is also usually female, at least in the media. This trope is rarely invoked with men, even though "sneakerheads" who collect dozens or more athletic shoes are not uncommon in real life. Still, a man gushing about shoes like a woman is usually a classic symptom of Camp Gay.

This trope is, naturally, a Double Standard, but it has become so pervasive that few try to question it. It is an odd fact that, on the basis of evidence garnered for the Eating Shoes page, most women would apparently prefer to starve than go to this horrifying extreme, however hungry they were.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Heineken used it in this commercial. Then the Brazilian arm of the company backfired by invoking this trope in a cross-promotion - during the 2014 UEFA Champions League final, a shoe sale website would offer discounts so women wouldn't bother their significant others.
• An advertisement for one of the Tekken games featured a clip of two women fighting over a pair of shoes. Cracked listed it as one of the most sexist video game advertisements of all time.

Anime & Manga

• An odd example in Blood+. Diva, while killing a bunch of people, takes interest in one guy's sneakers and steals them after killing him.
• Averted in Girls und Panzer with Yukari's mother Yoshiko. In the fifth OVA, she is said to have told her, in response to her collecting military footwear, that as you only have one pair of feet, you only need one pair of shoes.

Comedy

• One of Tim Allen's routines has him asking his wife why she needs 19 pairs of black shoes. Her response?
  "You stupid f*** er! Those are strap-backs, spikes, cobbie-cuddlers, espadrilles, flats, pumps, patent leathers, spectators, argh, argh, argh!"
• Dylan Moran says that contrary to popular belief, men are actually more romantic than women, as you will typically only ever hear men openly gush about their love for a woman, to the point of declaring that life is meaningless if they can't be with her, while you'll rarely ever hear women gush that way about men. You will, however, hear women gush that way about shoes. The full bit is on the Quotes page.
• In one routine, Ardal O'Hanlon notes the oft-contested hypothesis that women have a higher threshold for pain than men. He theorizes that this is because no matter what is happening to her, there's always part of a woman's brain that is thinking about shoes.

Comic Books

• Veronica from the Archie Comics buys a lot of shoes.
  • One story manages to combine the trope with Prefers Going Barefoot to comic effect. Veronica's father notices that Veronica has developed a habit of going everywhere barefoot. The next time she leaves the house, he stops her to ask why she buys so many shoes she isn't wearing.
  • A single-panel comic from the '60s had a similar gag, with Betty and Veronica at a shoe store chatting about great it is that they can have all the fun of shopping for shoes, but since it's the '60s and being a barefoot hippie is currently all the rage, they get to save money by not actually having to buy any in order to stay fashionable. In the background, the store owner has fallen asleep at the counter due to lack of customers.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In one early issue, Buffy's deadbeat dad rants about all the things he hates about living in a house full of women. The list is long, but he mentions shoes twice. When Buffy points this out, he replies, "You have twice as many shoes as you need!"
  • After Buffy and Satsu sleep together, Willow invokes this when she tries to get Satsu to describe what it was like:
    Willow: Did she make that high-pitched squeal? I call it her "shoe-sale noise"...
• Cinderella from Fables. She even owns her own shoe store, The Glass Slipper, although she tends to leave the day-to-day running of it to her Beleaguered Assistant Crispin.
• Mimi Pond, in her book Secrets of the Powder Room, in the spirit of mutual understanding, lets men in on the inner workings of the female mind - much of which involves shoes. She relates a sexual fantasy involving a shoe salesman, the climax involving his giving her a 50% discount.
• Underground Comics artist Leslie Sternbergh made a comic about this topic where she claimed she was worse than Imelda Marcos in this way.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: The stereotype of women loving shoes is a large part of why Steve Trevor can't stop laughing when Diana's only voiced concern while they're starting a Saturnian slave revolt and stealing a ship to get back home is that the slavers stole her boots and she's now stuck barefoot.

Comic Strips

• Comes up quite frequently in Cathy, who refers to shoes as "chocolate for the feet."
• There is a strip of Dilbert where Alice's cubicle is filled with shoeboxes. Dilbert comments that the money she spent could have fed a family of four for several months. The kicker? It's revealed that shoes all look exactly the same.
• Parodied in The Far Side: a woman is on a date with a man wearing ridiculous clown shoes, dumping him because "I judge a man by the shoes he wears."
• Madam & Eve: Few things get Madam more excited than a shoe sale.
• In a Pearls Before Swine strip, Pig opines that men and women aren't so different. Rat immediately shoots the idea down:
  Rat: [to a random woman] Excuse me, miss. How many pairs of shoes do you own?
  Woman: 714.
  Rat: I rest my case.
  Woman: No wait. Those are just the brown ones...
• Sara from Zits has this trait sometimes. She once got deeply offended by Jeremy when he failed to notice her new boots (but subverting the "men never notice shoes" part of the trope, when Jeremy claims this he asks Hector what's new about Sara. "Besides the boots?") but they made up when she realized that he's more enraptured with the nuances of her face.

Fan Works

• How the Light Gets In: Felicity has a freak out when she realizes she doesn't have any food to give Laurel's daughter at a party, leading to the following breakdown:
  Felicity: And then Laurel will be pissed that I didn't accommodate her baby and she'll leave and you'll be mad she's gone and you'll stop watering the fern and I'll never get to go shoe shopping with her!
  Oliver:...What?
  Felicity: Laurel has amazing taste in shoes.
• Discussed in passing in How to Sex Vol. 4–58:
  Where did my shoe go? If Dream stole it I will be mad. Women love shoes. If girls see me like this they will say L. Dream has no shoe game. He is wearing fake Yeezys.
• Fanfiction author Khaos Omega has deployed this a couple of times, including one pseudo-genderflipped case with Jet.
  • Jet owns an insane amount of shoes, especially what he calls his 'go-to' wedding heels (which by mid-October 2010 is already at quadruple digits). He even splits his massive collection into three groups based on how many pairs he believes he needs.
    • Some pairs, like his famous Ice Star stilettos, one pair total is enough.
    • Some pairs, he himself mains one but has extras for other people. Arielle Sakuraba actually got her pair of her elder sister Maranda's favorite pink extreme sandals with two locking ankle-straps thanks to this.
    • The rest, which includes the aforementioned wedding heels, "limit" doesn't exist.
  • Anise has a massive collection of shoes herself, especially high heels. She has a reason for the high heels part of the collection, in that she's close friends with Pararift 2015's version of prostitute-turned-porn star Julie Skyhigh; Anise even has both of what she views as Julie's signature heels, along with the jacket Julie only ever wears when in her knee-high boots.
    • While high heels are her primary choice of shoes (and the kind she wears all the time outside of certain situations such as an undercover mission where she'll be discovered if she wears heels), she also has some rather decent collections of ballet flats and various sandals. Crocs clogs are added to the mix after another girl who views them as her main shoes helps another girl maining similar shoes join the Rainbow Angels.
    • Basically, unless you ask her about UGG-brand boots or any kind of sneakers, she'll have a lot of pairs to choose from. Her one pair of the former, which she's only ever worn once (which lead to the reveal which reinvigorates her with a new transformation dubbed "Angel of the Twelve"), Dawn (who views that particular pair as her favorite) insisted she keep them. Because of her refusal to wear such boots normally, alias-turned-customized duplicate Anastasia Brayton got her signature stilettos.
  • Her Rune Angel teammates Lily and Kazuya also have massive collections of high heels, the latter another pseudo-genderflipped case. Anise actually bought most of both collections, Kazuya's being because she foresaw his forced Cross Dressing stint (hence his Anise-bought collection being mostly black pumps) and bought herself a lot more heels to hide it.
  • Not even Series limitations can stop Rainbow Angel girls from acquiring lots of shoes, as Kandyce Azeat and Daisy Stanton (who got most of hers thanks to Khaos' go-to Butt-Monkey Peach's misfortunes during "The Sequence") prove. Kandyce actually knew well ahead of time, and had even taken advantage of it as an excuse to buy shoes for other people (her teal locks received Jayden Omega's mate Emerald's spell limiting her hair's length changes to those that make it longer on revealing she gave Jayden his pair of the heels Kandyce had to wear due to the Series she was of at the time in 2204).
• Discussed in Mall Rats, where Lincoln wonders why women love shoes because nobody pays attention to feet.
• Ultimate Spider-Woman: Mary Jane Watson collects shoes like crazy, despite her usually limited finances. Her collection includes everything from boots to sandals to ballet flats to high heels to platforms to some 15 pairs of Converse All-Stars.
• Wind Flash Heroes Brave Heart: Lila wears her black high heels with tiny white ribbons on them. She shows Trevor off them.
  Lila: How do you like my shoes, Trevor?
  Trevor: Wow. They do look shiny to me.
  Lila: I know. Very shiny. Rebecca should get a pair like mine.

Films — Animation

• The female cast of The Croods have never heard of shoes before the film, but they seem very impressed with the ones Guy invents. Eep's first response is to scream in delight. It's implied that she is actually the first woman to wear shoes, ever.
  AAAHHH! I love them! Where are my feet?

Films — Live-Action

• The American President: Before President Shepherd's first date with Sydney Ellen Wade his teenage daughter tells him to compliment Sydney's shoes because women like that sort of thing.
• Europa Report. One of the male astronauts jokes that the frustration of the female members of their expedition is because they've only been issued two pairs of shoes.
• Discussed in Free Enterprise, when one of the protagonists is about to get it on with a girl, he get offended when she brushes off his Star Trek (and sci-fi in general) obsession as just another one of those "guy things", like huge speakers and fast cars. He tries to defend that not all things women do make sense and asks her how many pairs of shoes she has. The girl replies 51. To his shocked expression, she goes to do 50. Oh, and he doesn't get to prove his point, as she eventually storms out.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: Even after forcing a woman out of an elevator at gunpoint so she can make a quick escape, Baroness is still able to take the time to compliment the woman on her shoes.
• The film In Her Shoes has the two sides in The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry have as their only point in common that they have the same shoe size and both really like shoes. Rose at one point confesses why she buys shoes when she feels bad:
  "Clothes never look any good... food just makes me fatter... shoes always fit."
• In High Heels and Low Lifes, the list of things Frances says they need to buy with the blackmail money includes Jimmy Choos.
• A rare male example in the movie Kinky Boots, which features a small, family-business shoe factory making female footwear styles in mens' sizes for the transgender/Drag Queen market. Also a Real Life example as it is inspired by a true story; much of the movie was shot in the actual shoe factory that inspired the movie. Word of warning — don't mistake burgundy for red.
• Used as a plot point in Legally Blonde: When the supposed lover of the defendant makes a remark about Elle's "last season Prada shoes" (which apparently weren't last season), she realizes that he couldn't be the woman's lover because "No straight man knows designer shoes!"
  Elle: Warner, what kind of shoes are these?
  Warner: Uh...black ones?
  Elle: See!?
• This starts the film Overboard. A millionaire (Goldie Hawn) hires a carpenter (Kurt Russell) to make a shoe closet. She describes her current situation as catastrophic. And that's just the shoes she keeps on her yacht. (Then she refuses to pay and destroys his tools, then he uses a chance to get even.)
• In The Phantom, Dark Action Girl Sala takes a real liking to Diana's boots.
• Elisa from The Shape of Water is very fond of high heels and own multiple pairs. On her journey to the bus stop she is distracted by the latest pair of heels on a revolving platform in the shoe store window in the same way that Strickland will be distracted by the latest model Cadillac on a revolving platform at the car dealership.
• In Truth or Dare (2012), Eleanor seems to have a thing for shoes, making Paul carry her over a puddle so she doesn't ruin her 300 pound shoes, and wearing a sexy Dorothy Gale costume at the party as an excuse to wear high-heeled ruby slippers.
• When you strip away everything else from The Wizard of Oz, it all boils down to two women fighting over a pair of shoes.
• In The Wolverine, Yukio politely hands a pair of high heels to one of the prostitutes as she runs out the door in her underwear.

Literature

• Adrian Mole muses on this in Weapons of Mass Destruction.
  What is it about women and shoes? I have only three pairs: a brown pair, a black pair, and a pair of flip flops for when I am on holiday. They are perfectly adequate for my needs.
• One Dave Barry column mentions that a pregnant woman could be fleeing from a mugger and come across a shoe display, and immediately start squeeing over them, with the mugger being expected to agree.
• Betsy Taylor, the main character of MaryJanice Davidson's Betsy the Vampire Queen series is far more interested in shoes and sales than in the fact that she recently became Queen of the Vampires.
• As a leading proponent of Combat Stilettos, Ellen Patrick - a.k.a. the Domino Lady - is very fond of her collection of high-heel shoes.
• Averted for Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. For all the detail in which she describes her various dresses, outfits, and hair styles, her shoes usually only get a cursory mention, if that. Except for her favorite hunting boots.
• Journey to Chaos: Tiza owns many more pairs of shoes than she truly needs. She insists they all have practical, mercenary, purposes. Kasile turns her from hostile to friendly by complimenting her shoes.
• In The Lollipop Shoes, the sequel to Chocolat, Zozie de l'Alba has a whole collection of fabulous shoes that enchant and seduce, including the eponymous Lollipop Shoes. Anouk is also shown to be susceptible to their charms.
• Discussed in Love in a Nutshell where Kate comments that despite being a guy, Matt somehow has more shoes than her.
• Used as part of a joking explanation in Unseen Academicals of the phrase "a lie can run around the world before the truth has its boots on": since Truth is Beauty, rather than Handsomeness, Truth must be a woman. And according to this trope, any woman in a position to choose what shoes to wear would have a lot of them to choose from.

Live-Action TV

• Sally on 3rd Rock from the Sun. At one point she reveals her "bed" is actually made up of shoes boxes. She also gets upset whenever the mission looks like it's about to end as it means returning to their Starfish Alien forms which don't have feet to wear her beloved shoes on.
• Angel
  • Half of an entire scene in "Billy" (an episode about misogyny, domestic violence and women being victimized) is devoted to Cordelia and Lilah bantering about shoes.
  • In a later episode, Cordelia threatens Eve thus: "Get out of that chair and I will feed you those Manolo Blahniks. (pauses) Which are stunning, by the way."
• Penny from The Big Bang Theory has a large collection of shoes, despite being in a poor financial situation.
• In the episode of Black Books where they go on vacation, Bernard and Manny force Fran to pick two pairs of shoes to bring, rather than the twenty or so she wanted to pack.
  Fran: Those are my slow dancing mules! What if we get invited to a boat party by drug dealers?
• In Bones every female character is seen wearing a pair of heels in at least one scene per episode.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • At least Buffy and Cordelia have one thing in common. When Cordelia learns that Buffy has just moved to Sunnydale from L.A. Cordelia says she'd kill to live in L.A. so she could be "that close to that many shoes!"
  • Also the Big Bad for Season 5, Physical God Glory, who takes the form of a self-obsessed blonde female. In "Blood Ties", Buffy when goes to kick Glory in the face, Glory grabs her ankle and compliments Buffy on her shoes.
• Burn Notice: Fiona is obsessed with shoes. In particular, in "Entry Point" she is constantly distracted by the client of the week's large collection of shoes (he specializes in knock-offs). Which is a bit ironic, given that she is quick to go barefoot as soon as she is relaxing.
• One Caroline in the City episode has Caroline out of commission due to a bad back, so Del and Richard step in to finish the strip for her. Unfortunately, Caroline can't come up with an idea to give them, so they create their own strip whose punch line is nothing more than "Women can never have enough shoes", which they think is hilarious. Caroline thanks them for helping her, although she secretly hates the strip.
  • The punchline for the strip Del and Richard made was "I have too many shoes!" and the point was men got the joke but women didn't. At the end of the episode, they showed Daphne from Frasier reading the strip and not understanding the punchline. When she showed it to Niles, he got it immediately and thought it was hysterical.
• An episode of Coupling has Steve ranting, "Why do women have so many shoes? Do they have extra feet we don't know about?"
  • Though when the women get together, they comment about the fact that men's feet smell bad because they always wear the same shoes and their feet get marinated.
• From Criminal Minds. In "From Childhood's Hour", Morgan cites that a woman is definitely depressed because she only has four pairs of shoes. Reid doesn't get it. At the end of episode Reid is talking to JJ, Prentiss, and Garcia about it. JJ comments that even 10 pairs isn't enough, and Prentiss says that reminds her... she needs new boots.
• In the 90's Sitcom Cybill Cybill's best friend Maryanne has a walk in closet filled with nothing but shoes.
• In one episode of Desperate Housewives, Susan finds out that Orson has been supplying Mike with the drugs he's addicted to and storms into his office to confront him about it—pausing just long enough to compliment the patient he's with on her cute shoes.
• In an episode of Hannah Montana, Miley's dad offers to buy her shoes if she will stop seeing Jake. In the Hannah Montana: The Movie, she even gets into a Cat Fight with Tyra Banks over some heels.
  Miley: I have to have these shoes!
  Oliver: Why?
  Miley: They are shoes, I am a girl, do the math.
• Dr. Grace Molyneux from Harrow is quite a clothes horse. In "Malum In Se" ("Evil in Itself"), she correctly estimates how long a female corpse has been walled up from the style of shoes the corpse is wearing.
• Lily from How I Met Your Mother is a subversion of this trope. She loves shoes but unlike the usual examples, she only likes boots, no high heels. Unintentional late 00s period piece?
• Emma from Hustle. After their first big score, her brother Sean comments that she can buy enough Jimmy Choos to outfit an octopus.
• Jen of The IT Crowd loves shoes enough that she is willing to ruin her feet for them.
  Jen: [after the guys fail to notice her elegant and painful new heels] THE SHOES-AH! [storms out]
  Moss: What was all that about?
  Roy: Well, like all women, she's shoe mad!
  Moss: That's a bit sexist, isn't it?
  Roy: Do you know one woman who isn't obsessed with shoes?
  Moss: No, but I only know one woman, and she just left the room shouting "THE SHOES-AH!"
• JAG: The trope is lampshaded in one conversation between Harm and Mac in the third season episode "Vanished":
  Mac: In one way or another, we're all searching for something.
  Harm: Oh, yeah? What are you searching for?
  Mac: What every woman wants: a great career, a good man and comfortable shoes, lots and lots of them.
• Amanda Pierce and, to a lesser extent DJ, in The Latest Buzz. Even Naïve Everygirl Rebbecca Harper falls under the spell of a fabulous pair of mood-changing red shoes in the Wizard of Oz homage episode "The Wonderful Wizard of Buzz Issue".
• Leverage:
  • In an episode, Nate talks about what his team did with the "shattering amounts of money" they made bankrupting a corrupt corporation. Sophie "bought a frightening number of shoes."
    Parker: What is it with women and shoes?
    Sophie: There's something wrong with you.
    Eliot: That's what I said!
  • Brought up later when Parker has to play a part for a con, something Sophie usually does:
    Sophie: Go to Nate's storage cupboard. You're gonna find a sexy little minidress and my emergency Jimmy Choos.
    Parker: Jimmy who? You have a body in Nate's closet?
    Sophie: Shoes, Parker!
• Liv and Maddie - Liv tries to bring out tomboy Maddie's "sparkle" by showing her a particular pair of shoes. Maddie is apparently uninterested, but their mom becomes obsessed. It's later revealed Maddie is as well and due to not being used to feeling this way, refuses to take off the shoes which makes being captain of the basketball difficult.
• Motive: In "The Score", a waitress shows Paula and Angie the shoes that the Victim of the Week bought her, and Paula immediately identifies them as a $3000 pair of shoes. This is totally lost on Angie, who can only wonder at a pair of shoes that cost as much as a vacation in Costa Rica.
• Murdoch Mysteries: In "Victoria, Victorian", Crabtree says that he should have should have realised the "man" whose murder they were investigating was really a woman pulling a Sweet Polly Oliver when he discovered the victim had a closet full of handmade shoes. Both Crabtree and Murdoch apparently own two pairs of shoes.
• Orange Is the New Black: the warden is noted for her propensity for impractical shoes, especially Louboutins. The inmates are divided on the subject of whether, if they had that kind of money, they'd spend it on designer shoes.
• One of the earliest episodes from Pimp My Ride had a girl named Nile get her car pimped, and they installed an automated shoe rack in the trunk, with several pairs of brand new shoes for her. Upon showing the new car to her friends, they reacted with great enthusiasm, as expected, but seemed even more enthusiastic about the new shoes than the pimped out car.
• Rizzoli & Isles: As seen in the trope image, this is Maura's calling card.
• Scrubs:
  • Shoe shopping...
  • A more subtle example is when Elliot loses everything she owns when someone steals the moving van she was living out of at the time. At the end of the episode, she's gushing to JD about it.
  Elliot: [sobbing] There was all my favourite records... my very first love letters from high school... [wails hysterically] and my SHOOOOOOEEEEEESSSS!
• Sex and the City made Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik Household Names. Carrie was shown to be in deep debt because of her collection of hundreds of shoes costing several hundred bucks a pop, and in one episode Charlotte came across a shoe salesman with a foot fetish who loved her feet so much he gave her these fancy sandals for free. There are many, many references to shoes being this kind of holy sacrament throughout the show's run.
  • When Carrie takes a wrong turn down an alleyway, she is promptly mugged for her bagette, ring, watch and even the Blahniks off of her feet. No prizes for guessing which item she is most upset about losing.
• She-Hulk: Attorney at Law: Gender flipped by Pug who's an avid sneakerhead. When Nikki learns that he'll get two of every pair (one to wear and one to keep as a collectible) she's mildly concerned, but also admits that she can't help but respect the dedication.
• Sister Boniface Mysteries: In "Crimes and Miss Demeanours", Sister Boniface determines that the Victim of the Week was killed with a blow from a stiletto heeled shoe. Sister Boniface says that if they can find the shoe, there will probably still be trace evidence on it; regardless of how well the killer cleaned it. DI Gillespie suggests that the killer might have destroyed the shoes, but Ruth Penny snorts and tells him that no self-respecting woman would willingly get rid of a pair of designer stilettos.
• In That's So Raven, Raven gets a bad grade on her art project because it's a collage about shoes. Her art teacher says that's all she ever makes.
  • In another episode, she has to write a poem for English class. The title is "My Love for Shoes." Three guesses as to what it's about.

Music

• Joe Jackson sings about this phenomena in "Pretty Girls".
• Gender inverted in "Air Force Ones" by Nelly.
• Shoes. Shoes. Shoes. Oh, my God! Shoes.
• The Shania Twain song "Shoes" compares men to shoes.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic alludes to this at the start of "Girls Just Want to Have Lunch". But then he follows up with a subversion: trucks and tattoos.
• A male version named the Trip-hop/Alternative act the Sneaker Pimps, who chose the band name from an interview with Beastie Boys talking about their "Sneaker Pimp" - the guy they paid to track down classic Sneakers for them.

Puppet Shows

• The Muppets:
  • In the Carol Channing episode of The Muppet Show, Miss Piggy buys some stylish but excruciating shoes that are really too small for her. She continues to wear them after Kermit admires them.
  • In the live show The Muppets Take the Bowl, a spoof of Keeping Up with the Kardashians called Keeping Up with the Crustacians has Pepe the King Prawn complaining that Chloe Clam spends a fortune on shoes when she doesn't even have any feet.

Tabletop Games

• In Star Munchkin, players may be faced with the Bionic Bimbo. She's a fairly formidable opponent, and will fight you... unless you give her shoes (i.e., a "footwear" item.) She will even pay you handsomely for the shoes, with 3 Treasures.

Theatre

• Wicked
  • At the end , Glinda, with visible difficulty/pain, says to Elphaba "They're just shoes!" Said shoes are the infamous ruby slippers.
  • Glinda also has shelves full of shoes in her dorm with Elphaba during Popular.
  • Averted with Dorothy, who doesn't even want the ruby slippers anymore and would be happy to give them to Elphaba...except for the fact that they won't come off her feet, despite the fact that she's been trying to get them off for days...

Video Games

• Chicken Police: Girl Friday Monica demands payment in shoes. Sonny and Marty both owe her a favour, so she wants two pairs. Black, high heels, size 35.
• Cinderella's rooms in the second Dark Parables game include a massive walk-in closet filled with nothing but shoes. Of course, seeing as it's Cinderella, this is par for the course.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Leliana is obsessed with shoes. Not only are shoes the perfect gift item for her, one of her dialogs is nothing but her rambling about her obsession with shoes. The player, regardless of gender, can either tell her to shut up or start gushing about shoes as well... making this a gendeflip should the player be male.
    • No other woman shares her obsession, as Morrigan wants nothing to do with any of Leliana's fashion advice. One can only guess what else Marjolaine would be talking about if she weren't hunting Leliana, but her disparaging Leliana's state when she first came to Ferelden hints that she's just as into fashion as Leliana is. Perhaps it's an Orlesian thing.
    • Shale shows some mild interest in shoes during a banter with Leliana. This starts to make sense once you complete Shale's personal quest and discover that the golem contains the soul of a female dwarf.
    • Genderflipped with Zevran, who gushes a fair bit about these fabulous boots, although maybe that's more to do with his leather fetish.
  • Bethany Hawke in Dragon Age II, though not to the same extent as Leliana. She happily gushes over Orlesian fashion if you bring her to the Mark of the Assassin DLC.
  • Leliana's endearing love of shoes carries over to Dragon Age: Inquisition where during the Winter Palace deadly game she drops her guard and talks about shoes. It's all part of the spycraft in picking up, for example, royals reputed to be struggling financially showing off wealth, but her gushing makes it clear it's more than that. Should the assassin die at this time Leliana has a suggestion for the remains, do so and she jokes with The Inquisitor how a myth had begun of the assassin's ghost and shoes. Then there is a mission to help soldiers, Josephine's and Cullen's suggestions are reading material and a good meal, Leliana's is of course better shoes.
• Galaxy Angel: Ranpha Franboise has a huge interest in fashion, and the first game has a scene where she's trying to modify some of her own shoes to match the ones worn by the protagonist of her favorite romance movie. If she's chosen as the dance partner, she finds the real ones on display at a store and Tact buys them for her as a present, though they end up hurting her feet as they're not her size.
• Estelle Bright from The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy adores Stregas, a popular clothing brand across the continent. Of course, since she's a tomboy Action Girl, she goes for sneakers instead of heels. At one point during a Side Quest in chapter 3, she offers an open prayer of thanks to the Goddess upon learning that she's going to get paid to stress test the latest model. Occasionally she goes so far as to exclaim "Holy Stregas!", as apposed to the usual Oh, My Gods! treatment. In SC after meeting Kevin, the first thing they bond over is their appreciation for the brand, making this a Rare Male Example as well.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, the Figurine description for Rem the cobbler notes that Princess Zelda is his biggest source of income. Upon completing the quest line where he completes the Pegasus Boots, he even frantically recalls that he needs to complete an important order that King Daltus placed for Zelda, apparently unaware due to his sleepiness that Zelda has been turned to stone in the meantime.
  • A series of side-quests in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild involves Link having to dress as a woman in order to talk a traveler in giving him the Sand Boots and later the Snow Boots (which Link wants because they let him more easily traverse sand and snow respectively). The guy assumes that the beautiful woman he's talking to must really be into boots.
• Played with in the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC. When a female Shepard and Miranda are hanging out at the casino, Miranda admits she doesn't know how to have a normal "girl's night out." Shepard can suggest they have a little girl talk... which consists of Shepard suggesting they talk about "...Shoes?" (awkward silence) Then they both admit they're not really girly girls and settle on just having more wine.
• In each level of Ms. 'Splosion Man there is a well-hidden pair of shoes that serves as a bonus item.
• In Saints Row 2, Shaundi hands the Boss a broken lightbulb filled with loa dust and asks him/her to smoke it.
  Boss: Ever heard of a pipe?
  Shaundi: Pipes cost money. Money that could be used for drugs or shoes.
  • Also in Saints' Row 2, there's Luz Avalos, the former girlfriend of Angelo Lopez of Los Carnales in the first game. In the first game, she shows up at the Stilwater airport right after the Saints have blown up her boyfriend's plane, carrying a large, heavy bag. Dex and the Playa investigate the bag to see if it has guns, money, or uncut drugs, but instead, all they find is shoes- and not even the season's new collection, as the Playa points out with a gun to Luz' head. In the second game, Luz is running a shoe shop, and she's still not happy with the Boss' comment from their last meeting:
  Luz: I just want to set the record straight, those were not last season's shoes.
• The woman quoted in The Stanley Parable Raphael Trailer by the Narrator.
  A Woman: This place has shoes! I love shoes! Oh. My. God. Shopping! Shopping! Shopping! Shopping! Shopping!
• A Hidden Depths example with Sakura Kasugano in Ultra Street Fighter IV. She states in her Arcade win-quote against Poison that she likes her shoes.
  • Poison herself really loves high heels.
• Tekken features a gender inverted example with Kazuya Mishima, who likes to collect sneakers as a hobby. His Arcade Ending in Tekken 8 shows that Kazuya has a giant closet filled floor to ceiling with sneakers hidden behind his personal office.
• Can be invoked in Tropico where you can set the Shopping Mall to "Outlet Store" mode. This increases the quality of the store and doubles the prices, but only female Tropicans and tourists will shop there.
  Sunny Flowers: [regarding the opening of the Mall] "But aren't you worried about the spirit of blatant consumerism- shoes... must... get... to... mall!

Web Animation

• The fourth asdfmovie features this exchange:
  Wife: Honey, do you like my new shoes?
  Husband: You are a chair, darling.
  Wife: I can dream, Harold!!
• Ashlynn Ella of Ever After High's defining trait, which is expected since she's the daughter of Cinderella.

Web Comics

• In Dumbing of Age, Walky believes that only girls own more than one pair of shoes, and takes a great amount of male pride in only owning one pair himself. However, it turns out he's the only one who thinks like this, and is even told by macho dudebro Joe that he's being ridiculous and insecure.
• I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space!!! had the heroine distraught when she couldn't break the laws of physics to fill their spaceship with all the shoes she's bought.
• Both Catwoman and Harley Quinn pack huge amounts of shoes to go on vacation in Li'l Gotham, bewildeing their respective partners (Batman and the Joker).
• Mercedes Nieves of Other People's Business exemplifies this trope - although she occasionally puts her knowledge of shoes to good use.
• Gwynn in Sluggy Freelance has this as part of the "stereotypical shallow woman" side of her personality. At one point, it appears like it's being played straight when Gwynn is rooming with Aylee and acting withdrawn and Aylee hopes shoes will cheer her up. Actually, though, at this point Gwynn has been mind-swapped with Queen Siphaniana of ancient Mohkadun, so "Gwynn" in the present is really Siphaniana, who had asked for more practical shoes than the ones that Gwynn already has, so it's pretty much the inverse. Mind you, back in the past in the role of the Queen, Gwynn was having craftsmen make modern-style shoes for her...
• Lampshaded and parodied in this strip from The World of Vicki Fox. Vicki and her friend Meredith Skunk are Barefoot Cartoon Animals, but they enjoy shopping for shoes anyway.

Web Original

• Blanche Ingram from The Autobiography of Jane Eyre. She's wearing Louboutins at one party. The high heels are uncomfortable even though she's sitting, so she decided to take them off. She tweets about shopping for shoes, too.
• In the Italian webseries ''Insopportabilmente donna'' on YouTube, the creator and main protagonist, Tess Masazza, is shown purchasing several pairs of shoes which are considerably smaller than her size just to own them.
• Perhaps because she's so short, The Nostalgia Chick has an obsession with wearing high heeled boots everywhere. Even when fighting in a frigging brawl.
• The YouTube show Shoe Hoarders, where wealthy women (ranging from golddigging socialites to independent entrepreneurs) show off their massive shoe collections.

Western Animation

• In 3Below, Lt. Zadra accidentally orders a pair of red leather boots, but nevertheless adores them and wears them pretty much at all times, despite her alien figure not having humanoid feet.
• In The Batman, Bruce and Dick are following Barbara on her shopping trip:
  Dick: But Bruce! We just spent the last two hours watching her shop for handbags!
  Bruce: Well, you're in luck. I think she's moved on to the main event.
  Dick: [hopefully] Comic books?
  Bruce: Shoes.
  Dick: UGH!
• Alice from Dilbert has a secret affection for shoes. She is arguably the most masculine character on the show, and is somewhat shamed by her shopping habit.
• Ashlynn Ella from Ever After High is the definition of this trope. The fact that she works at a shoe store also supports this.
• Green Lantern: The Animated Series: After Carol Ferris becomes Star Sapphire, she doesn't like very much the Stripperific outfit, but after giving up the ring she does say she's going to miss the boots.
• Pepper in Iron Man: Armored Adventures invokes this trope when she goes giddy over all of the shoes in the stores. Even claiming it is an addiction.
  • Tony suggests Whitney is the same way when he accuses Pepper of becoming her during her shoe run.
• In Johnny Test Susan has a large collection of shoes in the lab that Bling-Bling Boy steals from her. She even gives us this quote:
  Susan: Johnny, there are many things boy will never understand, and one of them is their love of shoes. I barely understand it.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • While Candace doesn't seem to care much about them, her friend Stacy seems to love shoes enough to make a gelatin mold of some pumps.
  • In "Does This Duckbill Make Me Look Fat?", Dr. Doofenshmirtz invokes the trope while fighting Perry (who is in Candace's body) by shouting, "Look, shoes on sale!" before running away. Perry falls for it.
• The Simpsons:
  • While not typically a big concern of Marge and Lisa's, when the family went to New York City they were both utterly hypnotized by a revolving display of blue high heels. Also lampshades their Limited Wardrobe: "I know I already own a pair of shoes, but I want these so bad!"
  • This was also lampshaded/spoofed in an episode where the Simpson family clears out the late Maude Flanders's closet: upon seeing Maude's three pairs of shoes, Marge exclaims, without irony, "Wow—someone had a fetish!"
• South Park had an episode about this: "The List". Clyde's name is pushed to the top of a list of the cutest boys in fourth grade, but it's actually a conspiracy by some of the girls to get free merchandise from his father's shoe store. Apparently this is such Serious Business that Bebe is willing to hold her best friend and two boys at gunpoint to protect the secret. We're talking about nine-year-old girls here.
  Wendy: You've compromised everything! Our lists' integrity!
  Bebe: Did you see these shoes, Wendy?! [pulls out a new pair of shoes from her shopping bag] They're incredible!
  Wendy: It doesn't matter how incredible they are! You can't...Oh my God, those are amazing!
  Bebe: Right?!
  Wendy: Is that a lace across the top?
  Bebe: No, it's a little strap!
  Stan: (Shocked) Wendy!
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Being the stereotypical teenage girl that she is, Pearl seems to have a thing for shoes. For example, in the episode, “Squeaky Boots,” she wants these “totally hip new flipper slippers that all [her] friends are wearing” for her birthday. Of course, since this is Mr. Krabs, he instead buys her a cheap pair of fishing boots, which she refuses.
• Lo from Stōked! has an obsession with flip-flops. After Fin claims that Lo has 50 pairs of flip-flops, Lo tells her not to be ridiculous. She is not some spoiled brat. She only has 36 pairs.
• According to Boom from VBirds, "if you're tired of shoes, you're tired of life."
• Carver of The Weekenders is a rare male example and possibly an aversion as there is no hint to the trope otherwise and no character ever compares the closet full of shoes to a womanly tendency. The love actually comes from his love of sports and all of his shoes are actually athletic in nature. It probably also helps that he doesn't organize this closet at all and just has all his shoes in one big, manly pile on the floor. Still, the man loves his shoes.

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