Among pseudo-science’s many branches, the one claiming that it is possible to read people by their shoes is perhaps the wackiest. And yet women (it’s them who are usually the most loyal clients of fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, palmists and enchantresses of any sort) seem to hang on to such personality mapping methods with great enthusiasm. The latest person who tried to turn this into a business is Donna Sozio, author of the bookNever Trust a Man in Alligator Loafers. Alligator loafers aside, the idea that one detail only is enough to give away the complex personality traits of a person sounds, to us, rather loony and, to make things worse, if the detail under discussion is shoes than the risk of making a blunder is extremely high.

Broadly speaking, people’s shoes give away their personality in the same way as a pet resembles its owner. You don’t need to see Quentin Tarantino’s metal-tipped shoes to understand that he is a “naff” while Ryan Gosling’s impeccable dual-coloured outfits are enough to make you want to send him the most romantic messages. Jamie Hince’s unfashionable boots scream “Bought ages ago but too comfy to be bothered to change them” or, alternatively, “I’m a rock-star and I don’t give a damn about polishing my boots?”, but, apart from that,what does shoes say that we don’t know already?

What sort of insight into the mind of celebrities who can afford to wear a different pair of shoes any day of the year and often don’t even have a say in what they wear can this personality-shoe theory offer to us? Not to mention false positives like the one according to which, as devised by Sozio, a man wearing dishevelled shoes is unreliable and potentially nerve-fraying: what is the logic behind it? The rigorous link between the conditions of somebody’s shoes and their personality is more likely to be due to a tendency towards fetishism with a hint of bumptiousness rather than being the outcome of an unlike observation of behavioural patterns.

Those women with a wardrobe full of shoes looked after meticulously well will undoubtedly be well able to do without men who have no interest whatsoever in shoes; take for instance Michael Franti who has spent quite a substantial part of his life barefoot, what would you make of him?

Does wearing a pair of tennis shoes make a billionaire banker less wealthy or cool? To cut a long story short, if your life ambition is to find an eligible bachelor, try, first of all, to look at him in the face and eventually you can try to figure out the link between him and those hideous, rubber flip-flop.