“One day without shoes” doesn’t read much like a slogan you would expect an international shoe retailer to be publicising, however have you ever heard of TOMS?

TOMS Shoes is a rather lovely company that lets you indulge your footwear fetish whilst also allowing you to be charitable to others. For every pair of shoes you buy from TOMS, they provide a pair of shoes for a disadvantaged child in the developing world; calling their ingenious footwear logic “one for one”.

Too many children and young people living in the developing world do not have access to shoes and this seemingly irrelevant fact results in many deaths caused by exposure to soil parasites and infected waters. These children must walk for miles to attend school and are then often turned away as uniform regulations state that footwear is compulsory. In Ethiopia alone it is estimated that around 1 million people suffer from Podoconiosis, which is a debilitating and disfiguring disease cause from walking barefoot in volcanic soil, this is totally preventable by wearing shoes. Giving a child a pair of shoes in developing countries can literally save their life, and you thought you couldn’t live without shoes!

To help raise awareness of their fight to save lives and feet, TOMS have launched their One Day Without Shoes campaign and on the 8th of April 2010 are urging people around the globe to spend a minute, the afternoon or even the full day going barefoot and therefore spending the day in someone else’s shoes ... or not as the case may be.

Fashionable charitable causes like this usually attract the attention of the A List set and the TOMS event is no exception. YouTube.com is host to a few videos from the likes of Scrubs star Heather Graham and Hairspray’s Brittany Snow who pledge their support for the cause. Graham is slightly apprehensive about walking bare foot in her native New York City as “it’s really gross”, and I wish I could say differently of my walk to work along the Ashton Canal in Ancoats!

If walking around Manchester barefoot isn’t for you, and why would it be, you can still support this amazing cause by purchasing TOMS shoes from OFFICE and Schuh in store and online. The new S/S’10 collection is out now.

Words by Jordan McDowell. Images courtesy of TOMS

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