What I wore this week: over-the-knee boots

I know that whingeing about the hard life of a fashion editor isn’t a good look, but it is genuinely quite hard to write about how to wear this season’s over-the-knee boots. Because – can we take this off the record? – the point about over-the-knee boots is how to wear them without looking slutty. That’s the thought that goes through my mind.

But I can’t write about that, because to do so would basically suggest that looking slutty is intrinsically bad, that to dress provocatively is a crime or a character flaw. And that would be quite wrong, and not what I mean at all. If you choose to go about your day dressed like Julia Roberts in the opening scenes of Pretty Woman, then go you, because everyone knows she looks way better then than after she’s had the dullsville Beverly Hills makeover.

You would be in esteemed company, too: at Paris fashion week, Carine Roitfeld sometimes wears over-the-knee boots with spike heels and a tight skirt at 9am, and it really, really shouldn’t work, but she looks cool and elegant and terrifying in the best possible way, which goes to prove there are no real rules.

Still. IRL, as they say, I like the neat line of over-the-knee boots, but if I’m going to wear them in the daytime, I am conscious that they give off a certain bar-stool vibe that I don’t necessarily want to be defined by. This is no different from wearing, say, a dark polo neck and trousers, and then realising it looks a bit too sober and serious, and that it needs earrings, or the sleeves pushing up to the elbow, or a heel, or something. Fashion is not about what you are allowed to wear; it’s about putting you in control of how the world sees you.

So. If we have established that I can discuss the wearability of OTK boots without being a traitor to womankind, I have some suggestions. A dress such as the one I’m wearing here looks much more modern with boots than it would with, for instance, the bare legs and courts you might have worn a couple of autumns ago. Similarly, those ultra-long coats, which can feel a bit gloomy and Sherlock, look chic over boots that meet the hem of an above-the-knee skirt. But don’t mind me: if you want to wear them with a leather mini and fishnets instead, go for it.