Seven. That’s how many pairs of boots came out of the bottom of my closet last weekend, and I only found out because I was digging for a shoebox to mail something and ended up pulling everything out onto the floor instead.
Two black ankle boots that look almost identical except one has a slightly higher heel I never wear because I always forget which pair is which until I’m already ten minutes late. A pair of tall boots I bought for a trip to Chicago three winters ago and have worn maybe six times since. A pair of “rain boots” that are really just ugly boots I keep because throwing away a $12 purchase feels wasteful even when the $12 purchase is actively bad. And three more I’m not going to itemize because doing so is making me feel a way about myself I’d rather not sit with on a Tuesday.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about owning seven pairs of boots: you still reach for the same one and a half pairs every single day, and the rest exist purely as a monument to past versions of your taste. Standing there with all of them lined up, I could basically read my own history — the “trying to look like I had a Pinterest board” era, the “buying whatever was on sale regardless of fit” era, the one pair from an actually good year where I bought exactly what I needed and nothing else.
That last pair is a dark brown leather ankle boot with a pointed toe and a heel just tall enough to change how you stand. I bought it because I’d worn a cheaper version into the ground — sole separating, leather cracking at the crease — and decided I was done replacing the same $60 boot every eighteen months. I went looking for something actually built to last and landed on Mimmu (small disclosure: that’s an affiliate link, doesn’t cost you anything extra, just means I get a few cents if you end up browsing through it), an Italian label whose whole pitch is handmade leather boots rather than the mass-produced kind that fall apart the exact week your warranty ends.
Their current Fall/Winter lineup leans hard into exactly the kind of boots I keep reaching for — pointed-toe Western ankle boots, combat boots with a real lug sole, suede options with a folded cuff — all made in Italy, which after my last three “leather” boots turned out to have cardboard-adjacent soles, matters more to me than it used to. They’ve also got a clearance section running right now for anyone who, like me, only wants to buy one good pair instead of three mediocre ones.
I’m not going to pretend one nice pair fixed the seven-boot problem. It didn’t. The ugly rain boots are still in there, still not thrown away, still making me feel things. But it did change the ratio — I wear that one pair probably 70% of the time now, which means the other six are basically just taking up closet space for the 30% of days I apparently need a costume change.
If you’re staring down your own closet excavation this fall: you probably don’t need boot number eight. You need to actually retire boots two through seven and replace them with the one pair you’d grab in a fire. That’s the whole system. I wish it had cost me less to learn it.