The pleasure and pain of shoes: something afoot at the V&A

One of the first things you notice on entering the V&A’s new summer exhibition Shoes: Pleasure & Pain are the ballet slippers worn by Moira Shearer in Powell and Pressburger’s film The Red Shoes. Instead of being the usual confectionery pink, Shearer’s kid and satin slippers appear to have been dipped in blood. In the Hans Christian Andersen story on which the 1948 film is loosely based, the heroine Karen is doomed to dance to her death for wanting to show off her new crimson shoes in church. Even after she hacks off her incessantly whirling feet, the bloodied stumps continue to caper. Likewise, Shearer, as Vicky Page, is danced to her death by her fidgety red slippers as a punishment for wanting both art and love, ballet and marriage. In both cases, the red shoes, which initially seemed to offer the fulfilment of female desire, turn out to be its fatal scourge.

It’s a bit like that in real life too. The fashion for wearing ballerina slippers as streetwear, which crested a couple of years ago, appeared to offer the pleasing possibility of skipping insouciantly through summer, rocking an Audrey Hepburn or Amy Winehouse vibe. But anyone who has tried wearing ballet flats all day, whether in Cannes or Camden, will know that they are not adapted to pavement living. Every single bit of grit makes itself felt through the flexible soles, so that after a couple of hours you start to resemble another of Andersen’s heroines, the Little Mermaid, whose every step cut her feet to bloody ribbons.
It is this knife-edge walk between pleasure and pain that forms the throughline of the V&A show. Taken together, the 200 pairs of shoes and boots on display comprise an inquiry into the oddly powerful place footwear occupies in our individual and collective psyche (it would be hard to imagine the museum staging an exhibition about blouses, say, or skirts). Nor is this a subject that matters only to women. Men are well represented here, as fetishists and makers (which, you can’t help thinking, sometimes amounts to the same thing), but also as wearers. So, along with Empress Eugénie’s fur bootees and a pair of crystal evening shoes from Christian Dior the colour of pink champagne, you will find Oxford brogues, Wellington boots and some six-inch-high platforms from the glam rock era that were used, according to the anonymous original owner, to “kick the shit” out of anyone who got in the way of a good night out in 1973.

Leonaide Massine and Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Shoes matter, then, because they mark the place where our bodies contact the world and stories begin. One of the most striking objects in the exhibition is a single “slap-soled” shoe, a frothy arrangement of silk, satin and metal lace standing on what appears to be a permanent plinth. For a few decades in the middle of the 17th century, there was a fashion for ladies’ indoor shoes to come attached to a flat panel, which joined the bottom of the high heel to the toe. Not only did this lift the wearer above imaginary dirt and clod-hopping Puritans, it also provided a satisfying sound as the shoe made contact with the floor. Soon that flat-footed slap, which could be heard several beats before the wearer entered the room, became the mark of real lady.
This tumbling together of the material and the metaphoric is evident too in the history of the bathhouse clog. Originally designed by the Romans to keep their feet clear of other people’s soapy scum, the ancient clog travelled the known world, slimming down and picking up status as it went, much like this season’s unfeasibly fashionable “pool sandal” (Christopher Kane is doing some lovely ones for £300 a pop). In the Ottoman empire the clog came to rest as the ceremonial Qabâqib, best described as slip-on stilts. The Qabâqibs in the exhibition are nearly a foot tall, inlaid with mother of pearl, and were worn by a wealthy young woman during her wedding ceremony, which partly took place in the hammam. The effect must have been to turn the bride – naked on top of her preposterous pedestal – into a living statue.
Posing, it turns out, is what many of the shoes in this exhibition are all about. The grand parade of skyscraper heels, needle-point toes and clunky buckles is designed to make the point that useful activity, let alone manual labour, is pretty much impossible if you opt for statement footwear. The Indian princeling in possession of slippers with toes that curl and twist like smoke, and the Venetian lady tottering in her 21-inch-high chopines were sending a message that they relied on other people to do their dirty work for them. While the Maharaja and the Comtessa lounge around in their grandiose kicks, an army of slippered servants scurries about cooking, cleaning, filing and wiping infant noses.
Yet such gestures of dramatised dependency turn out to be only half the story. Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to the feeling of power that a set of manageably high heels can provide. In Qing dynasty China, for instance, women from eminent Manchu families wore richly embroidered shoes with a six-inch elevation that hoisted them far above the shorter Han women with their tiny bound feet. Not only did this lead to a sense of pleasing superiority, but it also allowed Manchu women to place themselves firmly in men’s sightlines. In ancient Greece a similar spirit of competition was in evidence when women attempted to follow the example of various stone Aphrodites by opting for thick-soled footwear. Their real intention, suggested the satirists, was to make sure they stood out in a crowd.
The commentators may have been right. Some women say they feel “powerful” in heels, others feel “sexy”. In truth, it can be difficult to parse the difference between the two. But that’s the great thing about shoes – they refuse to be pinned down to a single, reductive reading, insisting instead on bouncing up again as if made entirely of cork. Hence the way that so many of the shoes in this exhibition manage to be both legitimate and wayward, serious and slutty at the same time.

Shoes for bound feet, China, late 1800s. Photograph: courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum

Nowhere is this clearer than in the section devoted to the shoe industry’s borrowings from the sex trade. Discreet pilferings first became apparent in the 1890s when boots that looked as though they belonged in a brothel turned up on ordinary women doing a spot of light shopping in Selfridges. By the 1920s the blameless wives of European industrialists regularly stepped out in the kind of heels that would make a streetwalker blush. But the real blurring of boundaries occurred in the first decade of the 21st century when the main motifs of fetish footwear – patent leather, tight buttoning, toe cleavage, naked arches and sky-high heels – started to stalk the catwalk. In 2007 Christian Louboutin embarked on a collaboration with David Lynch entitled “Fetish” in which he made a series of what he admitted were “unwearable” shoes that the film-maker photographed on tottering, sprawling, naked models. Two years later Yves Saint Laurent’s “Tribute” sandal was spotted for what it actually was – a pole dancer’s shoe, complete with a platform sole for launching the wearer into a spectacular spin.
That moment of hypersexuality has passed, and we are now in the middle of a season of the so-called “ugly shoe” – flat, utilitarian and, like as not, a variation on something sensible that you were forced to wear at the age of eight. (It is for that reason that the dress code at Cannes this year made its odd stipulation about women having to wear heels on the red carpet: clearly there was a panic that people would turn up looking like they’d come straight from the beach.)
But if hooker chic is taking time off, there is no shortage of enthusiasm among avant-garde makers for exploring the extreme shapes into which the shoe – and the foot inside it – can be pushed and pulled. These days you’ll find Zaha Hadid applying her knowledge of complex structures to build a cantilever system that allows her “Nova” shoe to sport a surprisingly comfy six-inch heel. Dominic Wilcox has designed a prototype shoe that incorporates a GPS device into its heel. When you want to go home, all you have to do is click your heels together, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Alexander McQueen, meanwhile, has bequeathed us his “Armadillo” booties, which transform the wearer into a mutated superhuman, much as Noritaka Tatehana’s vertiginous take on the “geta” – the sandals worn by geisha – recently transformed Lady Gaga and Daphne Guinness into creatures from some strange new vision of the floating world.

Naomi Campbell falling over at the Vivienne Westwood fashion show, Paris in 1993. Photograph: News (UK) Ltd/Rex Features

But you don’t have to be an aristocratic model with avant-garde toes to care about this stuff. One of the great shifts in recent years, says the V&A’s curator Helen Persson, is the way that the language of shoe obsession has filtered down and broadened out. “It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of Sex and the City”, she explains. The HBO series, which ran from 1998 to 2004, starred Sarah Jessica Parker as the shoe-fixated Carrie Bradshaw, a New York journalist whose worst nightmare comes true when she is mugged at gunpoint for her shoes. Her happiest moment, by contrast, occurs when she stumbles on a pair of Manolo Blahnik Mary Janes – a single-strapped sandal – in the Vogue stock cupboard: “I thought these were an urban shoe myth!” That was the exact point in time, Persson suggests, that women with no previous exposure to the airless world of high fashion started to recognise not simply the names of leading shoe designers but their signature styles: red heels for Louboutin, crystals for Jimmy Choo, stilettos for Manolo Blahnik. It was like being given the password to the cool gang at school.
Knowing this stuff in theory and living it out in practice are, of course, different things. The exhibition ends by trying to understand why some women, and a few men, build up vast collections of shoes that they are unlikely to ever get round to wearing. It can’t be with any hope of making a profit: even the most spectacular pair of strappy Ferragamos do poorly at auction in comparison with a vintage Chanel suit or a Schiaparelli skirt. The pleasure seems to come from looking and touching. “Guya”, for instance, has a pair of Céline mink-fur pumps that are so precious that they can never leave the house. Another collector, who stores her shoes on bookshelves in her bedroom reports happily: “The first thing I see every morning are my shoes.” “Jeff”, meanwhile, is a sneaker-head with more than 1,000 pairs, who explains how hard it is becoming to maintain his collection’s individuality now that there are so many fanatics chasing each new limited edition. Other collections, meanwhile, turn out to be patterned by repetition rather than grand design. The exhibition contains a sample from Imelda Marcos’s legendary stash, and the great surprise here is how wedded the former first lady of the Philippines was to a serviceable mid-heel in neutral colours.

Two-teethed Geta, Japan, c1920. Photograph: courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum

The strangest collecting story of all, however, concerns Lionel Bussey, who collected women’s shoes from about 1914 until his death in 1969, by which time he had acquired 600 pairs. His hunting ground was the high street, typically Dolcis and Lilley & Skinner. Bussey had a keen eye for fashion, managing to pick the emblematic styles for each passing decade. The obvious conclusion must be that he spent his evenings either trying on the shoes himself or lovingly fingering their “tongue”, “throat” and “waist”. But that doesn’t quite work: the shoes Bussey collected straddle a whole range of women’s sizes and many of them have never been unwrapped. What’s more, he never seems to have had a moment’s embarrassment about his unusual hobby, making it clear that he hoped that his collection would end up in a museum. Doubtless, Bussey lived in simpler times, when a gentleman was free to collect ladies’ shoes as unselfconsciously as if they were postage stamps or birds’ eggs. But his story is also a reminder that sometimes shoes are just shoes: practical, pretty and, if you stick to the high street as he did, an affordable pleasure in a world that is remarkably resistant to fairytale endings.