At even the most conservative estimate, I own about 100 pairs of shoes. I have smart high heels for taking taxi rides in and flat ones for walking in. I have elegant black ankle boots for looking-smart-but-still-being-able-to-walk in, and pointy little witchy shoes for embarrassing my daughter in.

I own seven pairs of sneakers, two sets of wellington boots, four pairs of loafers and five lots of slippers. Some shoes are furnished with extraordinary, sculptural wedge-shaped heels, and others tipped with tiny stilettos. I own artisanal clogs that would befit a Quaker woodsmith, strappy snakeskin stilettos by Louis Vuitton and black-toed Chanel slingbacks that imbue the most banal of outfits with instant chic. I own Saint Laurent Patti Smith-style army boots, Marc Jacobs jackboots and a fabulous pair of banana-yellow boots from Céline with a fit so narrow they near give me a cardiac arrest each time I try and remove them.

The volume of shoes, and the creeping accumulation of their boxes, which are piled in stacked columns of teetering shoe-scrapers in every corner of the bedroom, are now the subject of considerable marital tension. The discussion usually begins with a question: “When are you going to do something about all these bloody shoes?” And ends with me arguing that excessive shoe ownership is, in fact, a job requirement. Which is facetious yet incontrovertible: if a fashion editor can’t own a stupidly tremendous number of shoes, then who the hell can?

And yet I concede. He does have a point. The bedroom does “look like a bedsit”, and the shoescrapers are entirely foul and ugly.

However — and I make this point in deadly earnest — I need them all. Every last pair. In the great everyday saga of getting dressed, the right shoe can make the difference between abject discomfort and a sense of pure infallibility. Nothing else can punctuate a look so efficiently — shoes are the semicolon, comma, exclamation mark and full stop of an outfit’s expression. Get a tiny detail wrong, a millimetre in heel height, the wrong toe shape, and everything looks off.

As I collect clothes with the exact same enthusiasm I do footwear, my shoe needs have seemingly multiplied. This goes with that, but not this, goes with that, goes with this. I never seem to have quite the shoe that I need. And so, as a result, I’ve gotten lost in an acquisitional shoe spiral, endlessly picking up variations of the same thing in search of fashion’s holy grail — the ultimate footwear solution.

It’s an issue that becomes even more urgent in winter, when coat lengths, hemlines and socks must be factored in. Winter shoes must traverse all kinds of environmental obstacles, and work with the seasonal trends. How does one balance the current crop of three-quarter-length culottes and midi-skirts, for example? What does one wear with a wide-legged tuxedo trouser so sweeping it collects autumnal debris in its wake? An over-the-knee silver stiletto boot by Balenciaga may work marvellously well with those bold-shouldered blazer shapes, but not without an accompanying chauffeur? I do not lie when I say that such dilemmas keep me awake at night.

Hence, it is with no small degree of excitement to announce that I may have found the answer. The footwear solution of autumn 2016 is a knee-high, block-heeled, tan-coloured boot. It’s a practical go-with-anything colour. It’s chunky enough to bash through a normal working day but works really well with a dress, and it tilts towards this season’s 1970s trend without looking massively fashionable. The style first presented itself at the Etro show in Milan (at which I was, perversely, looking at clothes destined for the shops next February), where the models wore a sturdy gaucho boot with kasbah robes, kaftan silks and boiler suits. They looked cool, they looked comfortable, and the looks were always perfectly proportioned.

The seed of an obsession was planted. And a short internet trawl later I found my boots at APC, the fantastic French fashion house at which one so often finds the things one really needs. This season, the store is selling an “Iris” boot (￡490), made in a thick, shiny conker-brown leather with a stacked square heel. I bought mine four weeks ago and haven’t taken them off since. They work with everything in my wardrobe and they never hurt. They weren’t cheap, but according to the fashion economy of cost-per-wear I reckon I’ll break even by Christmas.

Most importantly, the reason I know these boots are the solution is that every day I’ve worn them someone has approached me to ask where they’re from. Sartorial validation has been secured in every instance: the woman in the audience of a talk last week who rushed up afterwards; the fellow editor sat on the front row; the fashion designer who recalled owning something “just like that in the 1970s”.

Best of all, I’ve now been stopped five times (and counting) on the Tube to be asked about my boots. Smug? You bet I am. Not since I bought a pair of green suede pirate boots (from Schuh in 1999) has a single item in my possession invited so much attention.

On the flipside, with the discovery of a solution, the shoescrapers are becoming daily more endangered, more likely than ever to be suddenly condemned. And so I’ve had to mix it up a bit to ensure a stay of execution. I may have found the ultimate winter footwear, but I still need all those shoes.