Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Despite the fact that Italy is now an east-European economy that finds itself (still) in the Eurozone, the country's middle-class consumers were not letting facts get in the way of their fashion needs at the weekend. Stores were packed and there was simply no getting inside shoe shops because excited female buyers had laid siege to them in search of the season's must-have item: equestrian-style boots. No matter where we looked, the boots were there. Teenagers wore them with black tights and miniskirts, while their mothers were wearing them with various permutations of denim or autumnal skirts in corduroy.

Would New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd approve of this fad? She's got a book coming out next month titled "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide" and the title suggests that the Italian rage to wear sexy boots might not please the feminist side of the author. Still, if the appetizer fed to readers of the International Herald Tribune on Monday is anything to go by, MoDo has no option but to accept the Italian fetish. From "Where is the New Woman now?", reality bites:

"It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way."

Indeed, and in one of those odd coincidences that seems to keep on happening, Katie Roiphe, the author of Still She Haunts Me, asked "Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?" in Slate yesterday. Anyway, for those wanting to understand the current footwear fetish, Rainy Day readers should consider investing their hard-earned money in "Sexual Personae" by Camille Paglia. "It is an overview of Western art and literature based on the Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy, but the author is more interested in the dark Dionysian side," says The Joy of Knitting. "For her, all art is pornographic in the sense that it situates itself in the twilight area in which instincts, and especially sexual instincts, run riot." In other words, Paglia gets the meaning of the Gucci boot.

Meanwhile, back in the country with a heel in its geography, the mania for riding-boots has to be seen as a reaction to the impotence of politics. So, come back tomorrow for "the lie of the week". It's political. It's Italian.