It’s true– Indian men love shoes, and they love them more than Indian women. Here’s proof:
This graph shows the relative volume of searches done in the past one year in India for the terms “men shoes” and “women shoes”. Terms like “shoes for men” and “shoes for women” show similar trends. Surprised? So was I!
As the Google trend chart indicates, men’s shoes are way more popular than women’s shoes in India (globally the search trend is just the opposite). So does that mean Indian men are more interested in shoes than women? Well, it does seem to be so.
With most Indian women complaining that the guys here are just not fashionable, this little statistic has been puzzling me for a while now. Most women I spoke to said they knew guys who loved shoes but just didn’t know why.
To get some answers, I went straight to the source- guys I know who love shoes. This includes a colleague who loves wearing coloured shoes to work (our office dress code is smart casual) and a couple of friends. Here’s what they had to say:
Men have fewer fashion choices or options to change their look. There’s tshirts and shirts, jeans and trousers on a normal day. So how do you get some variety? With accessories, specifically shoes.
Watches are expensive, ties are almost redundant and in India you don’t get to experiment much with jewellery like cuff links or chains. Changing the shoes are an easy and inexpensive way to update a look.
Guys like to stick to specific types of shirts or styles (they even buy multiple pieces of a single garment at one time), and often repeat jeans throughout the week, so the lack of variety is made up with a change in footwear.
I think this seems to be a reasonable enough explanation. What do you think?
PS- Ladies, next time your man complains about your footwear collection, point to his shoe rack. And men, there’s nothing to be ashamed about- women completely understand what shoe love is, so admit it. 🙂