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Bridal lace: Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride.
Bridal lace: Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride. Photograph: ALLSTAR Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
Bridal lace: Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride. Photograph: ALLSTAR Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Running down that aisle: the unstoppable rise of wedding trainers

This article is more than 5 years old

Jimmy Choo has a £500 metallic pair and Kate Spade has brought out a whole ‘bridal range’ of plimsolls. Finally, brides can walk down aisles like actual humans!

Classically, the problem with wearing trainers to your own wedding would have been that they didn’t cost enough: nuptial economics dictate that everything has to cost 10 times more than usual, otherwise it looks as though you don’t really care.

Jimmy Choo has solved this knotty matter with a pair of metallic plimsolls costing more than £500; Roger Vivier has some crystal embellished laceless ones for 870 quid, so nobody could ever accuse you of failing to invest in your big day. And so trainers at weddings have become so acceptable that Kate Spade has brought out a “bridal range” – a selection of mid-market sparkly trainers for every occasion, so long as you end up married at the end of it.

A couple of slight problems: no element of the traditional wedding stands apart from any other. So once you have knocked out the delicate satin slipper in favour of a comfortable shoe, other things cascade away. Walking down the aisle is fatally compromised. You’ll end up just doing your regular walk, you’ll get to the front much faster than anyone expects and have to stand at the front just whistling until the talking starts. You could also conceivably dance in your regular dancing style, rather than like a shy camel who took five lessons and is clinging on to her partner, wondering which one of them is going to trample the other to death. The moment at which you kick those satin slippers off, because you have feet like a ballerina’s – no, not graceful and pointy but knobbly and bleeding – well, that point no longer arises. So the romantic photo of that moment, marriage’s graceful visual signifier of “everybody relax, she’s drunk”, never happens, either.

Ladies of the feminist persuasion have been known to marry in Dr Martens before, in a puckish two-fingers to the pantomime of femininity. Trainers were historically verboten not because they weren’t girly enough, but because they carried that unfortunate possibility that you might, subliminally, be planning to leg it. Their other name is “running shoes”; how much more Julia Roberts do you want to be? That’s the real revolution, here. There’s nothing about a Kate Spade bridal trainer, let alone a Christian Louboutin roller spiked trainer, that suggests running of any sort.

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