A 19th-century ‘Lotus’ shoe. Footbinding left women’s feet 8cm (3 in) long.
Photograph: V&A Museum
Forget the feathered Manolo Blahniks and crystal-studded Jimmy Choos, the red-soled Louboutins and gold-platformed Vivienne Westwoods. The corner of a cabinet that most clearly tells the story of Shoes: Pleasure and Pain, a new exhibition at the V&A, contains exquisite 19th-century Chinese silk shoes for bound feet which, at just 7.6cm long, showcase what was then considered the feminine ideal. Next to them are a hulking pair of Adidas basketball boots from the late 1980s; these are closer to the foot size of a small elephant than to a human.
The fact that shoes are often not foot-shaped is at the heart of what this exhibition is about. The cultural significance of shoes is a rich topic, and as a result has become fairly well-worn territory in recently years. The challenge for the V&A is to use its unrivalled collection to bring something new to the topic. As its title suggests, Pleasure and Pain attempts to bring a fresh angle by dint of a full-frontal view of the perversity and strangeness of our relationship with shoes.
Here, “fairytale” shoes don’t necessarily feature satin or glitter. The first display takes the Cinderella story – the creation myth of the luxury shoe industry – and shows how this applies to men as well as women. The story of the Seven-League Boots from European folk tales, which allow the boy wearer to leap and run great distances at speed and so win fame and fortune, is presented next to a pair of modern football boots endorsed by David Beckham. It is a good lesson in how the transformative powers of shoes are used in marketing footwear to nine-old-boys, as well as to thirty-something women. An even-handed balance between male and female is a strength of this exhibition, as is a global perspective. (The exhibition’s curator, Helen Persson, is a specialist in Chinese textiles and dress.) Together, this broad sweep elevates the exhibition above the vacuous “window display” effect that too often characterises this kind of show.
The themes of the show are transformation, status and seduction. That these are all linked, and that sexuality is imprinted through their core like a stick of rock, is suggested by the decor: in a boudoir’s half light, areas are semi-divided by velvet curtains falling in thick crimson folds. Since one of the sponsors of the exhibition is Agent Provocateur, one assumes the suggestiveness is entirely deliberate.
While transformation is explored in kaleidoscopic versions of the Cinderella story, from football boots to the feathered sandals that Carrie Bradshaw loses in an episode of Sex and The City, status is about the myriad ways in which both men and women have always used shoes to signal power and rank. A tiny terracotta statuette of Aphrodite on loan from the British Museum, made in Greece in the first century BC, shows her wearing platform sandals. As Persson points out: “In ancient Rome and Greece, free men wore shoes and slaves didn’t. The distinction is as ancient, and as stark as that.” There are decorative men’s slippers from the Silk Road in the first century BC, and platforms to lift the wealthier merchant above the murky puddles of 16th-century Venice. The exhibition moves beyond the obvious associations of heels as a signifier of height and a luxurious lifestyle to show the humour and fun in shoe obsession: for example, the leopard-print boots made for a wealthy London woman in 1943, which circumnavigated rationing rules by being made out of her old coats.
The seduction theme is at its most striking in a pair of Christian Louboutin fetish shoes, whose high heel has been bent to be almost parallel with the sole of the foot, making them impossible to walk in. The wearer can move only by crawling. The underside of the shoes features a transparent panel through which the tender, squished soles of her feet are visible, as she crawls. (There is a fairly arresting photograph of a semi-naked woman crawling in the shoes, displayed alongside them.)
There is so much going on with shoes that fashion barely gets a look-in. The same embellishments – feathers, crystal, fur, animal skin – appear on shoes from a thousand years ago, and on this season’s collections. A pair of boots in this exhibition covered in black colobus monkey fur, made by Elsa Schiaparelli in 1938, have a direct link with next-season Gucci, where new designer Alessandro Michele has made fur slippers for the autumn 2015 collection. The monkey fur may no longer be real, but the look is the same. “Shoes don’t obey the laws of fashion, because they go so much deeper,” says Persson. “We have mens’ shoes from 19th-century India and women’s Roger Vivier shoes from the 1950s which are very similar in appearance, and also very similar in what they are projecting about the wearer.”
A pair of Mary Quant boots is displayed upside down to show the daisy imprinted in the sole: the wearer would leave a trail of daisies in his or her wake. This is just one, very 1960s manifestation of another theme of the show, which is how shoes affect movement and body language. A highlight is a montage of film clips, which connect shoes and character at key moments on film. Marilyn Monroe wiggles along a station platform in Some Like It Hot, her black heels and stockings filmed from behind; in Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve takes prim steps in her Vivier pumps as she ascends the staircase and rings an apartment bell; Michael J Fox time-travels with his space-age white Nikes in Back to the Future 2; the camera pans from toe to head as John Travolta peacocks along the pavement in Saturday Night Fever.
There is one shoe myth that this exhibition casts doubt on, however. Persson’s personal favourite exhibit is a simple, well-worn pair of mid-height white Salvatore Ferragamo pumps, from the personal collection of Marilyn Monroe. Contrary to the urban myth, which holds that Monroe walked on one heel slightly shorter than the other to accentuate that wiggle, these are the same height.
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 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.
