From Cinderella to the girls of Sex and The City, women have always been obsessed with shoes.
That obsession, it seems, extends all around the word, even if the kind and style of shoes might change.
Now, a new survey attempts to quantify and qualify the links between nationality and footwear.
For starters, American women buy more shoes than Europeans, according to data by National Trade Sources and Research specialists, Euromonitor, Mintel, in a survey commissioned by Spartoo.com, a European online retailer of footwear.
Among Europeans, French women buy the largest number of shoes: an average of six pairs of shoes a year. A pair of smart stilettos, maybe by Christian Louboutin, ballerinas, like the favorite of the former first lady Carla Bruni, are de rigueur in a fashionable French closet.
English women buy an average of 5.4 pairs of shoes a year. They wear the brands Pretty Ballerinas and Manolo Blahnik, like the super model Kate Moss does, but also something more rock and punk, often with studs. Dr.Martens boots are always trendy in the UK.
Italian women (who buy an average of 5.2 pairs a year) go crazy for high heels. An Italian fashionista would easily wear 5-inch stilettos even for a simple happy hour.
On the other hand, Northern Europeans are more sporty. In Holland and Belgium women buy mainly comfortable sneakers.
