COSMETICS compa- nies support October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. @ Prescriptives will donate $1 trom the sale of every makeup brush purchased ar Preseriptives counters nation- wide to the Breast) Cancer Research Foundation. B Net proceeds from the sale of Estee Lauder’s refillable Pink Ribbon compact ($45.50) filled with Lucidity translucent powder and Pink Ribbon lipstick case (S13) will benefit Estee’s corporate fund for breast cancer research, @ Revion continues the sale of iss Kiss tor the Cure Super Lustrous lipsticks ($8.50), in Simply Sienna oor — Berry Beautiful, For every lipstick sold Revlon and its retail part- ner donate S] to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation’s (CBCF) Kiss for the Cure national fund. B Ac Eaton's, Clinique’s Plum Brandy Different lipstick with satin. maroon bag is $10.50 this month (regular price $14.50). Eaton’s and Clinique each donate $2.10 to the Look Good ... Fee! Better Program (LGEB), which is dedicated to helping women living with cancer look their best. @ The Royal Bank has joined with Eaton’s as a sponsor of Beauty Cares, a coast-to-coast event in support of LGFB. To Oct. 17, a portion of proceeds from cosmetics purchases at Eaton’s will be donated to the rogram. is Crabtree & Evelyn (Park Royal, Pacific Centre and Oakridge) will donate $2 from the sale of every 250 mL bath gel ($16.95), including prod- ucts from the men’s linc, to CBCF. The company has sup- ported breast cancer research with its campaign since °93. — Layne Christensen Sunday October 11, 1998 — North Shore News — 15 north shore news __ § FASHION Writer’s beloved boots combine style, substance John Moore Contributing Writer IF you caught a performance of the post-modern Australian dance troupe Tap Dogs during their two recent visits to Vancouver or clocked the footwear of Michael Jackson’s backup dancers on his “90s tours, you probably noticed those weren’t exactly dancing slip- pers the chorus bods were sporting. Vancouver sland) writer Jack Hodgins, chronicling his own adven- tures in the land of Oz several vears ago in his book Over Forty In Broken Hill, wakes frequent reference to the “clastic-sided work boots” worn by sheep shearers, station hands, jacka- roos, even firm wives, withour once getting the name down in print. Odd for a writer with an ear for dialogue, bur the accent and the Aussie habit of reducing everything to a diminutive nickname may have foiled his radar. In Australian parlance, they're “Blunnies,” the affectionate name for the Blundstone Company of Hobart, Tasmania, which now manufactures more than 250,000 of the functional clastic-sided brown ankle boots for a rapidly expanding international mar- ket that includes a lot of people who used to wear Doe Martens. Blundstones have gone Continental, becoming the footwear of choice for students and trendoids throughout the New Europa, partic- ularly in design-conscious Italy where Blundstone booths at trade fairs have been stormed by unlikely fashion- show crowds demanding the boots. Though Aussie students and artists adopted Blunnies decades ago. both as politically correct proletarian foorwear and for their hard-wearing qualities, international trendiness still leaves the Blundstone company somewhat bemused. Begun in the 1850s, the company fortune was founded by manufactur- ing boots for the Australian defence forces and it is still the largest manu- facturer of industrial footwear in the country, employing more chan 300 people. The Blunnie currently mak- ing fashion statements worldwide is a retro classic, designed in the carly 1950s as a light, tough all-purpose work boot for the outback farming and ranching community. That was where my own introduc- tion to Blunnies occurred, during the mid-*80s, in the small South NEWS photo Mike Wakelleid JOHN Moore values his Blunnies. “Easy to break in, lightweight and incredibly tough, they’ve saved my feet ... on more than one expedi- tion hike,’ says the Squamish-based writer and outdoor adventurer. Australian town of Loxton, a farming region which coincidentally happens to be a stronghold of the great Penfolds wine company. 1 was window-shopping in the Loxton Feed & Grain, an emporium devoted entirely to agricultural machinery, very large sacks of live- stock fodder, work clothes that Jooked like they were made from stove iron and a rack display of these odd boots which reminded me of the black boots called Romeos often worn by mechanics in Canada. While I was gathering what was left of my wits after several days of wine tastings, an old man emerged from the store. He had a face like a withered crab-apple fringed with used SOS pads, a blackened corncob pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth and he was wearing a pair of the boots I was looking at — except that his looked a hundred years old and were crusted with layers of the kind of indescribable muck only a farmyard can produce. As an outdoorsman and thus de facto connoisseur of footwear, | immediately remarked, “Those must be damn good boots.” “Course they are,” The Wife replied, having been raised in the country. “They're Blunnies.” I paid $5 more for my first pair at an Aussie Disposals surplus store in Bendigo, a rather civilized Australian mining town. I could have had them for $45 (Australian) in Loxton, but I didn’t complain. From the moment I slipped my dogs into that first pair, I've lived in them, walked cities and outback tracks in them, gardened in them, waded hip deep in the ocean and even slid my bare feet into them and worn them as slippers on cool nights. Easy to break in, lightweight and incredibly tough, they’ve saved my feet and arguably my life on more than one expedition hike taken in conventional boots that chafed up blisters under prolonged stress. ve blessed the instinct that made me toss my light Blunnies into the bottom of the knapsack more than once. Yhe cleared hard soles FRomeos usually have a that “shop sate") make Blundstones a superb trail shoe. The clastic sides are a drawback i that department, offering miaimal ankle support, but thar can be remedied WIN puttee strapping if vou have trail pins and is offset by the advantage of not having laces to break at inconve Hient moments. The only concession to the wetter climate of the Pacitie Northwest vou need to make is to rub in a good coat of Sno-Seal, first warming the leather with a hair dryer, the way vou would any pair of leather work or hiking boots. As fashion footwear, Blundstones accessorize with almost any carth- tone outdoor colours and gear, look- ing especially good with khakis. Less clunky than Doe Martens, they also avoid the para-military, aggressively confrontational first impression creat ed by a pair of calf-laced Does. Well cared for and polished, Blunnies can pass for dress boots with slacks. They actually do make dress versions of the boot with a cowboy heel and finished leather for occasions which require what some cutback restaurants describe as “Territorial formal” in their dress codes (open shirt, sports jacket, slacks rather than shorts and reai shoes instead of san- dals)}. Blunnies used to be all but impos- sible to get here and; though they wear like iron, it is possible to finally destroy the pair you bought on your Australian vacation. When my father- in-law announced he was visiting the other half of the family in’ the Antipodes, I slipped him fifty and my shoe size and told him to bring back a spare pair or Pd put all his tins of Guinness in the spin-dryer while he was gone, You don’t have to go to such. extremes. In 1993, Ian Heaps opened The Australian Boot Company at 1968 W. Fourth Ave..in Vancouver. Heaps got the Blundstene bug while touring Australia in the ’80s and did something about it when he gor home, acquiring the rights to sell and distribute the boots on the West Coast. You can also pick up a pair at Sports Style in the Crystal Lodge at Whistler. They run about $160 a pair, about three times what they cost Down Under after freight and taxes have taken their toll, but still repre- sent good value against some of the laminated glorified sneakers that pass for trail and sport shoes here. If you have friends taking an Australian vacation soon, go try a pair on, make a careful note of the size (Australian shoe-size numbers don’t correspond to ours) and slip them $60 to bring you back a pair from the source.