IRONICALLY, COUTURE aside, the French are best known in shoe history for the sabot, a wooden shoe that mill workers would hurl into the machinery at their workplaces in order to make the mills shut down. Not only did this practice give rise to the word "sabotage" and presage the French revolution, it cemented the notion that shoes are more than just fun, functional, fashionable, and symbolic — they're also political.

	VINCENT de Jesus, 38, musical director and composer, has 37 pairs of shoes (including sandals).

This brings us back, full circle, to children's stories and their unintentional brainwashing on the subject of shoes. Cinderella was far from the only tale with a shoe twist, after all. In an earlier, non-Disney version, Snow White's stepmother was punished for her sins by being made to dance in a pair of iron shoes, heated red-hot. The heroine from the fairy tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon had to search for her lost love while clad in a similar pair of metal clogs (though fortunately at room temperature), while the poor girl in the tale of The Red Shoes danced to her death in the eponymous footwear. The Wicked Witch of the East in L. Frank Baum's Oz books was not only crushed by an unexpected falling house, but — horror of horrors! — had her ruby slippers taken from her, post-mortem.

Nearly from birth, therefore, we are told that shoes, while undoubtedly dangerous with their seductive charms (particularly red ones, it seems), are time-honored and utterly essential accessories needed for traveling the path to power and prestige. Princesses, witches, knights, and emperors may be defined by their deeds, but they are also unified, apparently, by their common possession of fancy shoes. To return to our original example, one can only imagine the discomfort and constant dread of imminent laceration Cinderella would have endured wearing shoes made entirely of glass — yet she danced in them, not just till midnight, but eventually, all the way to the throne.

In these more plebeian times we live in, of course, shoes cannot exactly be relied upon to deliver us straight to a royal wedding. But they do make us look good, feel good — and yes, incidentally, they happen to protect our feet. These are not unimportant benefits at a time when global media and the Internet keep us uncomfortably aware of hardship and tragedy happening all around us. In times like these, it's simply reassuring to be able to buy and wear a little portable happiness — our heads may be awash in stress and anxiety, but our feet, at least, are not only firmly on the ground, they are also fashionably so. So really, even at the staggering expense of over $400 for a pair of Manolo Blahniks, you could write it off as a small enough price to pay for your own little personal happy ending.

Or, you know, a closet full of them.

Between the two of them, married writers Dean Francis and Nikki Alfar have accumulated 11 Palanca Awards, three National Book Awards, and sundry publications, not counting Dean's National Book Award-nominated anthology, Philippine Speculative Fiction, volume 2 of which is coming out in December this year. Aside from their precociously brilliant four-year-old daughter Sage, this article is their first actual collaboration.