#70s platforms

Goodbye to the Gateway Shoes

To commemorate these awesome vintage 70′s fruit platforms, I put together this outfit. I didn’t wear it anywhere else except for the backyard, for these photos. I’ve never done that before because I want my blog to document what I actually wear out in the world everyday, but the release of these platforms back into the thrifting wild warranted an exception.

It was 1978, the summer after sixth grade and I was in Indianapolis with my mom and my brothers Peter and Andy.  At some point we went to an AmVets Thrift Store, and one of those brothers came across these shoes that seemed so outrageous and they insisted on getting them for me and called them a birthday present.

We were on this trip because Andy was starting college at Herron Art school. This is significant because he’s the first brother who went away to college. I think it was probably my first time in the big city of Indianapolis, and these shoes seemed like something you could only find once you ventured out of Evansville.

I love that this is what my family did together when we were in a new town: Hey! Let’s go to a thrift store! That my two brothers saw these shoes and couldn’t pass them up--let’s see if they fit Jane! That my mom had no concerns and in fact thought they were a great gift. They were like permission for the rest of my life, to get the weird impractical but totally compelling and mesmerizing thing and not worry about “but when will I wear it?” This was the best birthday gift ever.

I had many plans to incorporate them into outfits or base costumes around them over the years.  But I actually never wore them, not once, other than around the house every once in while when I was bored. Sometimes, in various places where I lived, I’d put them on display. Over the years, the little pieces of plastic fruit started falling off. I went as far as buying replacement fruit at a craft store, but never made the repair. And at some point I realized that my feet had grown and the shoes didn’t actually fit anymore.

I love wearing them in this picture, in my grown-up body, with my tattoos that represent these milestones in my life--marriage and two children, and the articulation of what adornment means to me (the shoe tattoo). 

So now they’re back out there for someone else to discover.

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