Breathe
By Edmée Pardo
Experts say that footwear yields a significant percentage of information about the wearer: height and weight, bone health, status, aesthetics, authority, social role.
Shoes speak for their owners.
Perhaps it was Cinderella who taught us to find the person by the clothes she wears. Her minimal and crystal shoes already said a lot about her: her small body, her delicacy to walk in those heels without breaking them and also her ability to find alliances and ways to get her way, at the same time her transparency and luminosity. Kamala Harris, President Biden 's vice presidential running mate, distinguished herself by wearing converse sneakers to reveal some of her personality traits: she breaks conventions, values comfort, proposes new aesthetics and her own rules, is ready to work and has her feet on the ground. Perhaps that is why, I venture to think, she is less seen in the national and international political scene.
Angela Dorothea Merkel, one of the most admired leaders on the planet, is known to have rejected the fine and expensive designer shoes donated to the chancellery on the grounds that "you can't lead the world on tiptoes." In one interview she said the high heels reminded her of women in imperial China with their feet broken and bound so they could not flee their homes. "Heels are the portable prisons of women in the West," she stated. Her shoes were the subject of geopolitics in conventions of world leaders and in one of her visits to Argentina, an image went all over the social networks comparing her shoes with those of Cristina Fernandez: expensive and with a very pronounced heel.
The New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who has been said to be forged with a mixture of steel and kindness, and who has shown a proactive and unconventional way of governing, is distinguished by a variety of footwear: very low heels, sandals, moccasins, tennis shoes, boots. We can assume that he is versatile, flexible, and that he is prepared to walk the different territories that his work demands.
What shoes should the next president of Mexico wear?
Certainly ones designed for long walks, that cushion impacts against the ground, and that offer the right grip for climbing hills: the work ahead requires a lot of walking and going uphill. She needs comfortable, ergonomic shoes, made and designed in Mexico (in León, Guanajuato, if possible) that will allow her to take care of herself, promote Mexican industry and value our talents, while she travels the country. She needs purple shoes, that adapt to the shape of her own foot and not a general insole, to fight for women's rights; without internal seams so as not to lose the rhythm with painful wounds in the thinnest part. I don't know if it's just one pair or many. But, above all, you need hundreds of pairs of shoes by your side, walking in the construction of a country where we all fit and can go through life free, in abundance and without fear. I already have mine.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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