Veteran singer and EGOT winner Jennifer Hudson shared that she refused to purchase $20,000 sneakers for her son, asking, “What do the shoes do?!”

During a recent episode of The Jennifer Hudson Show, Hudson told the audience that David Daniel Otunga Jr. asked her for a pair of Jordan 11 Retro OVO Grey Snakeskins. He picked out the highly sought-after sneakers typically auctioned for $20,000 during their trip to a local clothing store. However, he walked away empty-handed as the Chicago native refused to buy him such an expensive pair of shoes.

“What do the shoes do?!” she recalled asking her son during the show on Oct. 18. “What it do? Is it going to drive me somewhere?”

Hudson also shared that a sales associate told her someone had just bought shoes for a whopping $7,000–something that she wouldn’t have dared done in her youth. She explained that as a kid, her mother used to buy cheap clothes for her and her siblings.

“‘I, as a kid, my brother and my sister loved gym shoes, and they would get the Jordans and name brands stuff,” she recalled, adding that she’d tell her now-late mother, Darnell Donerson, “‘Mama, don’t worry about me, take me to Payless.'”

The “spotlight” singer added that Otunga Jr. recommended sneakers to purchase for herself, and when she bought them, he said, “They’re fake.”

“It’s not about the shoe. It’s about how you feel in your shoes,” she insisted while sharing a new pair of kicks she bought. “And you know what’s real to you…it’s about what you value, and that’s what I love to teach the children. So, growing up, I used to cut up my clothes and make my things original.”

Her illustrious career has given her plenty of opportunities to buy expensive ones, but she decided to keep it sensible. As such, she continued saying her newest pair were “real to me” and that she doesn’t “care if you think they’re fake or not.”