Imelda and her shoes

TALK of shoes and one name immediately comes to mind — Imelda Marcos. The former First Lady remains world-renowned for her shoe collection, thanks to 1,220 pairs abandoned in Malacañang in the Marcoses’s haste to flee the country in 1986 during the Edsa people power revolt.

Imelda’s famed collection was even rumored to be about 3,000 pairs, 200 of which are now housed in the shoe museum of Marikina, the country’s shoe capital. On display there are eight-and-a-half size shoes of some of the classiest brands — Ferragamo, Givenchy, Chanel and Christian Dior.

When PCIJ interviewed her for its multimedia presentation on 20 years of Edsa 1, Imelda was not the least repentant about the issue of her expensive shoes. “When they went to my closet, they found no skeletons, only shoes,” she claimed. “The more they dig, the more beauty they will discover, beautiful jewels of the world.”

She said she had to buy the shoes to show to the people as a standard, of what was the latest, so they will be in step with the rest of the world. “Mass follows class, class never follows mass,” she avered.

Listen to a portion of that podcast. The longer interview can be accessed here.

Now, Imelda is even launching her own line of clothing, jewelry, fashion accessories, and of course, shoes, which boasts of a “funky and streetwise” style as typified by pink sneakers with diamond-tipped shoelaces, dog-collared chokers and Cleopatra bracelets, the Los Angeles Times reported last Sunday.

Twenty years after their fall, Imelda’s star still shines, not as lustrous, but definitely far from fading into the night. Explained Sheila Coronel in her i Report Edsa Special article on Imelda:

Even today no one says it like Imelda. No one does it like Imelda. Whatever we may think of her, she is an original. No one like her had appeared on our stage before, and no one has upstaged her since. Although the signs of age and wear are there — she is, after all, 76 years old — she is still quotable, still fabulous, still so out of this world.

Until now, no one can propel us to the heights of hyper-reality as Imelda can. No one else can be so reviled as a symbol of extravagance and excess, while also remaining so appealing. For deep in the Pinoy soul is a sensibility as baroque as Imelda’s (just look at the jeepney), a ?air for drama as ?amboyant, and a craving for acceptance as desperate as hers.

This is why, even though we know all about her and she is more caricature than real, she remains an irresistible spectacle, a natural crowd drawer. She is still a star. Take it from her: “I try to be a star only because I want to be a light in the dark of the night, to give people hope and to give them the faith that if you can think it, you can make it, if you can dream it, it can be real. That’s my life.”

Read more of Imelda here.