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.

Rory McIlroy Rocks Limited Edition Nike Golf Shoes on Masters Sunday

Rory McIlroy may not have won a green jacket on Sunday at Augusta National, but he did get a new pair of Nike golf shoes.
The world's top-ranked player debuted a limited edition version of Nike's Lunar Control 3 shoes in the final round of the 2015 Masters. Rory's new kicks feature the familiar white/black/green color scheme of Nike's Vapor line of golf clubs, as well as a special chrome-colored swoosh.
The limited editon cleats have the same technical specs found in the standard Lunar Control 3 model, including Nike Flywire technology for lateral support and a carbon fiber midfoot shank for increased stability.

Photo: Courtesy of Nike

Sole of Limited Edition Nike Lunar Control 3 Golf Shoes

The limited edtion Lunar Control 3 shoes are available at Nike.com as long as supplies last.
McIlroy began the final round of the Masters 10 shots behind Jordan Spieth and played alongside fellow Nike golfer Tiger Woods.

Through the years: Nike's history of sustainable innovation

What began in the 1990s as a response to issues in a complex supply chain has evolved into a business insight at the core of Nike's growth strategy – one that focuses on delivering innovations across its supply chain to create products that are better for athletes, its business, and the planet.
That evolution, which turns risk into an innovation opportunity by embracing transparency and collaboration, makes sense for business and can help solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. As Nike president and CEO Mark Parker put it: "Nike succeeds because we're obsessed with innovation. We are relentlessly curious about our world and how we can make it better. We apply that curiosity to our sustainability efforts, and we continue to learn what is required for real, meaningful progress."
So how did Nike go from the starting line to running full speed toward a more sustainable future? Click on the graphic below to explore some of the major milestones for yourself.

Copy on this page is provided by Nike, supporter of the sustainable design hub

High heels and their perennial appeal: why pain seems a small price to pay

Marilyn Monroe famously had half an inch chopped off one of hers to enhance the wiggle in her walk, while supermodel Veronica Webb claims they "put your ass on a pedestal, where it belongs". I'm talking, of course, about high heels. Those towers of female footwear that combine a plethora of complex contradictions: empowerment, vulnerability, sexual allure, femininity, subversion, fetishism.

Whatever they mean to you, it seems one thing is consistent: British women can't get enough of them. A study has revealed that we teeter around in the highest heels of all our European counterparts, on average elevating our feet by 8.25cm. In fact, a quarter of British women regularly brave stilettos that perch precariously between 10 and 15cm, inspired by the likes of Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole, Elle Macpherson and Kelly Brook, all of whom are devotees of such skyscraping styles.
The Duchess of Cambridge, whose dedication to her LK Bennett "Sledge" 11cm heels has been much commented on, has done wonders for the popularity of the leg-lengthening powers of the "nude" platformed stiletto. The £195 style, from the brand's Signature Collection, has sold out numerous times, and the company is currently stocking the flattering, classic court in a revenue-generating 12 colours to meet consumer demand for a new take on Kate Middleton's style.
So what exactly is the appeal of the high heel? Is it an empowering accessory, a weapon in the arsenal of post-feminist women's sartorial power? Or is it a subversive relic from a male-dominated world, designed to cripple vulnerable women in their quest to meet a fashionable and social ideal?
Former Clothes Show presenter Vanessa Scott runs a successful video production company within the fashion and luxury goods industry and – even at a statuesque 5ft 10in – knows all too well the power of a heel. "I'm very much part of the Sex and the City generation and, for me, high heels will always be synonymous with Carrie Bradshaw. Her obsession with shoes was symbolic of a woman's sexual and financial freedom today. What woman doesn't adore high heels? They provide the illusion of instant liposuction and are Viagra for the soul. Quite simply, you look sexier and feel sexier – what man could resist?"
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A study earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Physiology revealed that women who habitually wear high heels are at a heightened risk of permanent damage to their knees, hips, back and tendons, because the shoe shape forces the wearer to place all of her body weight on the ball of the foot, compromising stability. This, in turn, makes her compensate for the instability by pushing her knees and hips forward and arching her back.
Despite the discomfort and the potential damage associated with heels, the psychologist Bernard Rudofsky, author of The Unfashionable Human Body, says: "Physical distress is accepted by women if it is a constitutional part of the pleasure of courtship and mating. Women will furiously defend their high heels because any distress to their feet is in itself a form of attraction for men, many of whom feel it is a sacrifice made for them."
Camilla Morton believes the appeal of the heel is more deeply ingrained in women's psyche. The fashion writer and author of How to Walk in High Heels is a disciple of the Manolo Blahnik heel and describes her passion thus: "As a nation, our children are brought up reading fairy stories, and we associate heels with transformation. It's about the glass slipper that Cinderella slips on before being whisked off to the ball. We don't swan around in crinolined ball gowns and horse-drawn coaches, but we can wear the heels with the magical aura. Without a doubt, putting on a pair of heels is totally transformative: they make you feel something special is going to happen. As young girls, many of us looked up to our mothers wearing high heels and they symbolised everything that was womanly in the world. Barbie, with her pink stilettos and feet permanently moulded to wear heels, was everything a grown-up was meant to be: forget the boobs, the heels turn you into a woman."
I, certainly, am not immune to the aggrandising nature of these soaring shoes. While I now spend much of my life as the mother of a four-year-old running around in trainers, brogues or ballet pumps, I have over the last two decades accrued a collection of heels that would not be out of place in a costume archive.
There are beribboned Pradas with spindle-like stilettos wrapped in velvet the colour of Parma Violets. For more vampish occasions, I wear patent red Mary Janes with high-rise heels and matching soles by the cobbler du jour, Christian Louboutin.
I have more silk courts by Anya Hindmarch and teetering rose pink satin Jimmy Choo mules scattered with a sprinkling of beads. Row upon row of stacked boxes bear the names of Rupert Sanderson, Marni, Dolce & Gabbana, Gina, Christian Dior, Topshop, Emma Hope, Paul Smith, Moschino and Ralph Lauren.
Many are the remnants of a more glamorous pre-parenting life, attending fashion industry parties and reporting from the red carpet. They have little relevance in my current incarnation, juggling my daughter's ballet lessons and playdates with my home-based, slipper-clad work as a freelance writer, but I unwrap a pair of heels at every opportunity. This weekend, I briefly discarded my "mum-shoes" for a sexy pair of killer heels and was instantly shifted into party mode for a friend's 40th birthday.
For my first wedding, in 1993, Mr Choo himself measured my feet and handmade a pair of couture Duchess satin heels to match my gown. The magic of those shoes lasted longer than the marriage, and when I wed my second husband last year I wore a wonderful pair of silver, strappy glittered heels by Martine Sitbon – the perfect platform for a diminutive 5ft 2in bride to kiss her 6ft 4in husband.
As someone who is below average in terms of my physical stature – British women are now among the shortest in Europe, with the average 18- to 29-year-old measuring in at 5ft 4in (163cm) – I relish the leg-lengthening opportunity to slip my size 4s into the shoemakers' equivalent of the Shard.
A pair of heels allows me to view the world from a different vantage point. I can look people in the eye, so those who previously looked down their nose at me must view me on their level – a psychological benefit that comes into play socially and in the workplace.
Zoe Mayson, a business psychologist, suggests that I am not alone in valuing the heel as a professional asset. "There are a lot of people who think women do themselves a disservice by wearing heels, but I'm not in that camp. They are a psychological asset, and we can use them to our advantage. I work a lot with men in suits around a boardroom table, and I would never lead a session in flats. Heels give me gravitas that I would not have in lower shoes.
"From an evolutionary point of view, natural selection favours traits that increase our individual reproductive success. Heels get you noticed and give you physical stature, which in turn, gives you power, without compromising your femininity. So often, women have to take on male attributes to be successful in the workplace, and this is a great way of digging our heels in and saying no."
Just look at the self-confessed glamour-geek Marissa Mayer, the newly-appointed president and CEO of Yahoo! in her sassy stilettos and you can see that heels and brains are a potent combination in even the most male-dominated of industries.
Historically, heels have been used as a form of marking power: some 10,000 years ago, tribal chieftains were known to wear stilts at meetings to allow them to look down on the members of their tribe. And, in the 16th century, when European aristocrats adopted the heels favoured by Catherine de Medici, they were outraged when commoners began to wear them too. A law was passed prohibiting anyone below the "rank" of gentry from wearing heels – hence, the expression "well-heeled".
Even in colonial America, under British rule, a similar law existed: "Citizens of common class … are prohibited from wearing boots or shoes of satin cloth or ribbons, or of bright colours, or shoes with stilted heels. All such footwear is a mark of rank and privilege. Those of lesser class who attempt to emulate those of stations above by their attire will be considered in violation of His Majesty's laws and subject to fine or jail or both."
Jump to the 1950s and the popularity of the newly created stiletto heel reached pandemic proportions. Inspired by the creations of Salvatore Ferragamo and Roger Vivier – known as the Fabergé of footwear, women complemented the full-skirted hourglass silhouette of their "New Look" postwar fashion with a seductive stiletto heel, echoing the glamour of Hollywood icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren.
Not until the 1980s were heels the height of fashion, with the advent of Dynasty-style power dressing as women climbed the career ladder, and the infamous white stiletto worn by everyone from Diana, Princess of Wales, to the stereotypical Essex girl, dancing around her handbag to Bananarama – in 1987, the high street chain Dolcis sold over a quarter of a million pairs of the much derided style.
Today, thanks to Carrie Bradshaw, Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik are household names, and £25k-a-year office juniors aspire to own designer heels that cost more than their monthly rent. In an age where princesses wear high street heels to meet the US president, there's plenty of mileage left in the high heel yet.
As the footwear historian William A Rossi points out, "most women prefer a trip to hell in high heels than to walk flat-heeled to heaven".