Sensible shoes for sensible people? The equation doesn't hold. Despite women's struggle for equal rights, they never abandoned fanciful shoes. From the suffragettes pounding the pavements of London, to 1950s femme working-class lesbians, women have delighted in fantastic shoes. Not all shoes of whimsy are the same; they can be delicate slippers or long wet-look black boots. Even the utilitarian doc marten can be redeployed by girl power dressing. Yet this delight in the fantastic potential of shoes is precisely what society uses to judge women as impulsive, irrational, capricious—yes—whimsical. Even the powerful girls of Sex and the City seem to be drugged by the appearance of fabulous shoes; they lust after the Blahniks in shop windows, their eyes follow great shoe-wearers orgiastically.
Marie Antoinette is remembered as the Queen who lost her head for extravagance, utterly unaware of the unfolding world around her. What the Parisian mob rescued from the scaffold at her execution in 1793 was neither her hat, nor glove nor the simple dress she wore on that tragic day. It was a rosette and her shoe, a rather sad and single one. This token of an old and corrupt regime, symbol of the danger of feminine spending, once contained the royal foot, a holy relic of monarchy for some, for others the last emblem of debauchery, frivolity and obscene luxury embodied in a low-heeled fashionable slipper.
The shoe is the ultimate whimsy; a type of pretence or charade that we are not really close to the filth and degradation of the earth. Most world cultures use shoes to mark boundaries between the body and the ground, from the tiny lotus escapins of Chinese ladies to the tall platform shoes of Renaissance prostitutes. Always present is the idea that certain shoes indicate that we need not labour in our shoes; hence limousine shoes for the New York woman and her imitators who pretend they have drivers for the space of one evening. Marie Antoinette was not the last woman whose shoes marked her as villainous. Think of Imelda, the dictator's darling, whose three thousand pairs of high-heeled shoes (only 1,060 according to a slightly outraged Imelda!) marked her story of jet-set glamour purchased in distant Beverly Hills, in contrast to the tale of exploitation and sweatshops which reflected more closely the Marcos regime. On the exile of Imelda her shoes were displayed in the palace bedroom as a type of proof that the regime was unmotivated—whimsical—and evil. Shoes and wasteful women always seem to go together.
But the whimsical nature of the shoe—the possibilities of extreme forms that society permits woman's footwear—from the vertiginous heights of the contemporary stiletto to studded sadomasochist Westwood exercises, extends beyond clichéd images of moral weakness and female flaws. The whimsical shoe, so much part of our vision of femininity, has also been a powerful symbol of female emancipation, of aggressive gender redefinition and of overt sexual liberation. Shoes are really a type of affirmative action for women, an exclusive club of imaginative form and colour that men attempted to re-enter in the 1980s and then fled from with revulsion. It is women—not men—who buy shoes, and who fall in love with Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo, just to wake like Cinderella the following morning with no glass slipper and only their husband's empty wallet. This is the cliché of shoes; that they are what women want and what men must let them have. Men are consigned to the wearing of ‘sensible shoes' with appropriately sensible names such as Derby or Oxford . This is the pedestrian end of fashion with no heels, no decoration and little colour. Most of these shoes, of course, are very British and they spread themselves around the Anglo-Saxon world.
Women's shoes boast instead an astonishing degree of expression and fancy that does not spurn gold and diamonds (fake and real), plastic and raffia, fur and tassels. Women's shoes have so many features that they almost seem to smile, laugh, leer and sneer. The red shoes worn by Marilyn Monroe tell of love and passion, as well as hinting at more overtly sexual innuendo; yet a slightly different cast of heel or patent can suggest polite tastefulness and respectable affluence. Within a wide grammar there are infinite suggestions and possibilities. For early-twentieth century suffragettes, heels were a means of confirming their femininity in what was a man's world of politics. Dressed in their best clothes they pounded the pavement in heeled button-boots, or enjoyed tennis in feminine high-heeled sports-shoes. Their shoes rejected arguments that the vote would de-feminize women. Centuries earlier, in Renaissance Italy, 20-inch tall platform shoes (called chopines ) with fancy decorations and bright colours caused the consternation of city magistrates and religious authorities alike. In the streets of Florence and Milan ladies towered over all passing men, parading their ‘elevated status' with the help of servants. When in 1655 the Venetian senate discussed the reduction of the maximum height of this platform chopine to under 8 inches, an old senator argued instead that the maximum height should be increased by law in order to prevent wives and daughters from easily walking the city's streets instead of taking care of household affairs.
In the twentieth century women have expressed a different consciousness about their bodies and dressing through the display of cleavage and legs, the disclosure of bellies and shoulders, and the allusion to body-parts that can be styled in Brazilian or Californian coiffures. The foot too has been both discovered and uncovered. Shoes are no longer cases for the feet that shape them and either protect them from harsh labour or make them look smaller and more gracious. They are instead supports, stage-like props that are used to walk, to stroll, or to dance at a party. It is this notion that Westwood understood better than anyone, when she dressed her models in platforms that suggested they might work out of a frame. In the west now it is women—not men—who regularly reveal their toes and varnished nails, display amazing foot arches, confirming that they are in charge of their bodies and the messages—more or less naughty—that they convey. Shoes are not randomly chosen, but carefully selected either to reveal or conceal, to attract or repel.
The shoemakers- célèbre such as Salvatore Ferragamo, Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo owe their reputation to this ability to capture both the mood and the meanings that women hope their shoes will embody. Ferragamo's ‘impossible' heels combine high-tech research on materials with a search for defiance of gravity. Women's feet are no longer governed by Newtonian law. Blahnik's playful association of hyper-chic and boudoir decoration removes women from the busy commercial streets of New York, London or Tokyo and grants them an exemption from the ordinary working life that wants women to behave and perform like hard-working men. It is not by chance that the women-behaving-badly of the cult TV-series Sex and The City refer to Manolo Blahnik with the same familiarity that their mothers in the 1950s and 1960s would have referred to the magic properties of the latest bathroom detergent. This is the optimistic world of female empowerment through whimsical shoes.
Notes
Peter McNeil delivered a lecture about shoes for the Annual Craft Victoria Lecture at the National Gallery of Victoria on 6 December 2006.
A version of this text was presented by the editors as a speech at the launch of Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers , in collaboration with the Venetian Fashion Group (ACRiB), at The University Club, New York, November 2006.
Shoes : A History from Sandals to Sneakers
Giorgio Riello & Peter McNeil oz
Hbk 448pp 1845204433 $79
2006.08 Berg Publishers
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