Whose Shoes?

A quick-step through some shoe symbolism in art and culture along the path from innocence to experience...

Shoes are part of language: Going toe to toe. Being well-heeled. Too strait-laced by far. The shoe’s on the other foot, now! Hoist yourself up by your own bootstraps. Put the boot in. Before you judge another, walk a mile in their shoes.

Wouldn’t it be good to be in your shoes
Even if it was for just one day?
Wouldn’t it be good if we could wish ourselves away?
- Nik Kershaw

Perhaps the most widely known symbolic shoe would be Cinderella’s glass slipper. A delicate, fragile thing that the prince must slip gently onto the foot of his beloved. Cinderella fled the ball when things were likely to get a little more ‘serious’ after midnight. The forlorn prince must then search for her among many candidates… When he finally finds ‘the one’, it’s imperative that he treat her gently and with respect. For if the foot is inserted too forcefully, it could break the delicate vessel.

illustrations for ‘Cinderella’: ‘The Prince Ponders the Slipper Left Behind’ by Harry Clarke for the 1922 edition of ‘The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault’ and the 1905 poster ‘Finding that the Slipper Fits’ by Hans Printz [view license 1 and 2 ]

Like many fairy stories and folk tales, there’s an underlying theme of sexual awakening and the transition from childhood into the scary adult world — the point when experience begins to outweigh innocence. In early tellings, the slipper is not glass but of some other delicate material, such as fine silk or even gold leaf. In less child-friendly versions of the tale, the ‘ugly sisters’ cut off their own toes to fit into the slipper. I’ll leave the reader to ponder possible meanings that may have something to do with emasculation, or simply loss of virginity. However, the result was that the unsullied slipper became red and this may well be the origin of the recurring association of red shoes with sexuality.

Shoes have a long history of socio-political associations. They’re the most fetishised of any fashion item and some have become cultural icons. They have been central to the oppression of women throughout history by forcing impractical, restrictive fashions upon them.

The most extreme, and thankfully outmoded, example of this was foot binding in China. This tradition persisted until the early twentieth-century and involved breaking the feet of young girls before controlling their growth with tight binding so their feet would be…