Footnotes On Shoes

"At once cultural texts & commodities, shoes represent the human condition in all its complexity. This remarkable compendium of essays reveals how shoes transcend multiple identities, boundaries, & emotions. From brogans to Cinderella's tiny slipper & beyond, shoes embody the intersections among gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, race, age, & the multiple joys, sorrows, ambivalences, & anxieties of everyday life. Readers of this interdisciplinary volume will never again take shoes for granted." --Susan Kaiser, author of The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context "This is, in fashion parlance, a major shoe moment." --The New York Times, Week in Review, March 5, 2000 There's far more to shoes than leather. They are at once commodities & aesthetic artifacts. They inspire collectors, from the infamous Marie Antoinette & Imelda Marcos to contemporary Gen-Xers, who stockpile Steve Madden platforms, to the thirty- to forty-year-old crowd who spend hundreds on Manolo Blahnik heels & Prada boots. Shoes, far more than mere foot coverings, both underscore & subvert class, gender, ethnic, & racial identities. Footnotes: On Shoes explores the many paradoxes inherent in shoes--in collecting, consuming, fashioning, representing, & wearing them--as well as their enduring fascination. This collection of fourteen essays--all published here for the first time--captures the cultural significance of shoes in art, film, literature, history, folklore, dance, psychology, & sexuality. Contributors look at the shoes that former slaves wore in their march toward freedom following the Civil War, the empty shoes of the Holocaust that represent their murdered wearers, ballet slippers that bear the marks of artistic obsession, & high heels that serve as markers of Latina feminine identity. They also explore shoes in film & in works of contemporary art by Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, & Lisa Milroy. Footnotes extends inquiry beyond the traditional approaches of fashion historians & students of design by using shoes as the foundation for broader explorations of issues such as race, gender, & social class.Benstock, Shari is the author of 'Footnotes On Shoes' with ISBN 9780813528717 and ISBN 0813528712.