Throw away your sneakers and buy yourself a set of fashionable new yellow klompen

From our special correspondent: an important news story about fashion, shoes (see also my last entry for an intriguing question), and the colours that you need to choose if you want to be "in". Maybe the British people feel relieved because they don't have to wear wooden shoes yet, but believe me: it's just a matter of time and they will all change their minds!
This is my prognosis: in the next couple of years the whole world will discover how great it is to wear Dutch wooden shoes. Just think about it: no shoe laces, no traffic lights were somebody can hang them out of your reach, and with rising sea levels (now we're back to the global warming and melting ice caps issue) it is also a good idea to have something that will keep you floating.
So be wise and take my advice: throw your sneakers in the air and get yourself a hot pair of yellow klompen. Thanks, Carol - this is the kind of information we are all looking for. And have a look at this website if you still think that this is just nonsense. If it ain't Dutch, it ain't much - as we modestly say in our humble country - a couple of metres below sea level.

It could have been worse

Alexis Petridis, Saturday September 1, 2007
I'm bewildered by the process by which designers determine what colours will be "in" each season. It's one of life's great mysteries, like the anomalous trajectories of unmanned spacecraft in the outer solar system or the ongoing career of Vernon Kay. Why did they decide, en masse, that men should wear Yves Klein blue this summer? Do they get together and vote on it? Is there a debate? How shrill and hysterical do you imagine a debate involving fashion designers would become?
So there's something pleasing about one colour predicted to be big in the next few months. It's not that I'm fussed either way about yellow. A jaunty antidote to dowdy autumn tones it may be, but if, like me, you have a pallid complexion, it's going to do you no favours, unless you actively want to look as if you're on the verge of death. It's just that I know from whence the penchant for this colour came.
The answer, as I'm sure you've guessed, is traditional Dutch clogs. Patriotic to a fault, Amsterdam designers Viktor & Rolf had every model in their autumn/winter show wearing bright yellow wooden klompen: there were men in three-piece suits wearing klompen, men in bow-ties wearing klompen, and one man in tight leopard-print trousers and klompen decorated with paintings of windmills, who you can only hope was handsomely renumerated.
The people who rework ideas from the catwalk for the UK high street were understandably unconvinced that your average British male was going to embrace klompen, but they clearly liked something, hence the colour's arrival in Debenhams and Topman. You might not care for it, but think of it this way: at least they're not suggesting you spend autumn in a pair of huge wooden shoes going clip-clipperty-clop to the pub.
Source: Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007