In early 2024, I started paying attention to the shoes people wear at social and institutional gatherings—mainly art openings, if I'm honest. I began to notice how deliberate those choices were, how the shoes themselves seemed to perform a role. It wasn’t a critique, but it did make me question my own unremarkable footwear. Why didn’t I have shoes that belonged in these spaces? Later, my boss would make a passing remark about “their big shoes,” and I responded, half-joking but serious, “I want to be seen like that, too.”