I Wanted Negroni, But…

As I introduced in a previous blog post, my husband has long been a fan of Negroni driving shoes.

夫が常にドライビングシューズ『NEGRONI（ネグローニ）』を履いている件

When my husband goes to buy Negroni driving shoes, I often tag along, and one time I wanted a pair for myself and looked for women’s sizes, but the store staff told me, “Negroni only stocks MEN’s sizes in-store,” which was really disappointing.

Later, a blog reader kindly told me, “If you go all the way to their factory in Tokyo, they can make custom women’s shoes,” but considering the round-trip Shinkansen fare and all, I thought it was a bit too much and just let time pass…

Then in May this year, our BMW 320i arrived, and I started driving a manual car almost every day. However, the sneakers I usually wear are high-tops with thick soles, making clutch operation very difficult, so I kept thinking, “I really should get some driving shoes…” but still did nothing for quite a while. (By the way, these are the sneakers I wear ↓)

No Women’s Driving Shoes Available

One day, my husband saw my shoes and said,

“You’re still wearing those? No wonder you can’t drive the GT3 well! Hurry up and buy some driving shoes!”

So I finally got motivated to start looking, but most women’s driving shoes are “loafer style,” and sneaker types are almost nonexistent. (Since I usually wear sneakers, I absolutely wanted sneaker-style shoes.)

I checked various manufacturers’ websites, but even when I found something I liked, it was usually men’s sizes only, often starting at 25cm. When I said, “I want driving shoes, but I can’t find any I like,” my husband also searched on Amazon, but

“They have 24.5cm, but nothing at 24.0cm…”

He was struggling. I said, “24.5cm would be fine though (-_-),” but he replied,

“No, driving shoes have to fit your feet perfectly. Shoes are really important when driving a manual car!”

He kept searching diligently. But as it got tedious, I thought, “Maybe anything will do,” and asked, “How about these running shoes? They look kind of similar, right?” He said,

“No way. Driving shoes have rounded heels on the soles to make pedal operation easier. Running shoes have edges, right? It’s pointless to buy something like that.”

Then we found a promising pair of Puma driving shoes, and I thought, “Oh! These are perfect!” But when I checked the price, all sizes were under 10,000 yen except 24.0cm, which was priced at 45,000 yen for some reason.

Amazon can be so mysterious… (*_*)

There was also a nice-looking pair on an overseas site, but the currency symbol was unfamiliar, so I got scared and gave up. Then my husband said,

“Nope, nothing at all. At this point, I guess you have to make your own. Ferdinand Porsche said, ‘I couldn’t find a car that fulfilled my dream, so I decided to build one myself,’ right? lol”

I said, “No way that’s possible (-_-),” but then I briefly imagined that maybe there are many women like me out there, that there’s huge demand for women’s driving shoes, and if I made some, they’d sell like crazy worldwide and be a huge success…

But realistically, that’s just not going to happen, so I gave up. (Obviously lol)

Next page → The driving shoes I bought: Puma × BMW…?