Rustically Handsome Apparel and a design opportunity
I suppose I’m a Woman in Tech. I do technical things. I fix things, I break things and I make things. I’m a designer/maker who was trained in old-fashioned woodworking techniques. I can tune, sharpen and use a hand plane. I run a fab lab in New Zealand so I do technologically technical things as well.
My jobs have allowed me to wear rustically handsome clothing if I choose. Most of the time it’s been necessary because I do messy work and often wear coveralls or lab coats to protect my clothing. I also wear steel capped boots frequently.
I use my rustically handsome style to stand out a bit, to show girls and other women that it’s possible to have a job doing creative messy things. It’s a different way of dressing to impress. It also helps to remind everyone that it wasn’t just a short period in the 1980s when girls could do anything. I have 11-year-old girls asking me why I dress like that, and when I tell them what my job involves they ask ‘can girls do that?’
I’m OK with the rustically handsome look most of the time, but I get a bit bored with the shoes. I have a style that integrates a level of frock-iness with my steel caps. But no froufrou or power dressing. It just doesn’t work with the shoes.
I don’t wear lady steel capped boots because the lady steel capped shoes and boots have no discernible style. I go for the comfortable wide men’s ones. Basically, if I’m going to wear ugly shoes, I might as well be comfortable. I’ve searched for different boots, and you can see the results below.
I can’t see any difference between the results of the first two searches, unless the fuchsia details in the second image count, and the third one is just wishful tagging. Using a confidential search engine made very little difference to the results so I suppose I can just blame the tagging…
Maybe my ‘preferred search engine’ decided that I mis-typed and that I wasn’t really looking for steel toe high heels.
It would be funny if the search engine returned a response like ‘are you mad?’
I suppose that’s effectively what they’ve done though.
So who’s going to design some safety boots or shoes for me that don’t look awful with a frock?
Is it possible to wear a froufrou frock and safety shoes without looking like an Annah Stretton/Bob the builder mashup?
