Best Foot Forward

As we enter the holiday season with its great gobs of merchandise on display, I find that one item alone is still capable of tempting me. Fashion cycles may come and go, and I may grow weary of shopping in all other respects, but when it comes to shoes, I remain passionately acquisitive. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, “To be tired of shoes is to be tired of life.”

Since I am not alone in my shoe fetish, I have concluded that shoes are emblematic of something more than themselves. They are an index to civilization. After all, at its origins, the shoe had no pretensions beyond protection of the foot from the vagaries of temperature and terrain. In medieval times, foot coverings were mostly rags and strips of leather, sometimes abetted by a thick wooden overshoe, the patten, which raised the wearer above the mud and muck. With so much else to face — plague, famine, mud — people back then weren’t in the best position to pay attention to their shoes.

But society has evolved, and shoes along with it. To those who find an interest in shoes to be frivolous, my response is: “Get out of the Middle Ages!” One of the signs of the Renaissance, that rebirth of learning and culture, was the advent of a life for shoes. The era saw the introduction of the chopine, the platform shoe, to which the 1970s owes so much of its tacky charm. In the 1500s, two-part shoes appeared, with stiff soles, supple leather tops, and heels that were attached rather than added as secondary parts. If you want to see true shoe mania, check out the footgear in the court of Louis XIV. The Sun King was a fashion nut, and “Louis heels” became the rage, at first more for men than women. Louis decreed that only aristocrats could wear talon rouges (red heels), in a Louboutin-ish move avant la lettre. Eventually, women followed Louis’ lead and exaggerated the form, taking the heels to greater and greater heights. At one point, women’s heels were so high that wearers had to balance themselves with canes, Given that hair was also big and dresses cumbersome, one can imagine that simple activities — walking from room to room, no less going to the bathroom — would have been an ordeal.

You can feel a revolution brewing just looking at the shoes that followed from Louis XIV’s fashion mania. Marie Antoinette is said to have gone to the guillotine in two-inch heels — even in the face of death, she couldn’t abide wearing flats. Napoleon banned high heels, presumably owing to their aristocratic associations, though also, possibly, to avoid looking like a pigmy in proximity to a fashionable lady. In America, Puritans condemned heels as seductive accessories of the devil (the heel said to resemble a cloven hoof), and decreed that any woman wearing them should be tried as a witch.

Nowadays, shoes are less linked to class, politics, and religion — though vestiges of these things linger. If you wear Birkenstocks, let’s face it, we know all we need to know about you. You can get a nice-looking pair of shoes for peanuts at Payless, but a shoe aficionado can tell that they’re cheap at a glance and put an end to your upwardly mobile aspirations. Better to go to Loehmann’s or the DSW sales rack, where you may find a pair of Manolos drastically reduced, even if a size too small. Most women will weather serious pain — if not guillotining or burning at the stake — if the shoes are nice enough.

Some people (mostly men) don’t understand what other people (mostly women) see in shoes, so let me explain for the uninitiated.

To begin, shoes are, despite being subject to fashionable trends, timeless accessories in their connection to a portion of the anatomy that remains largely unchanged once it has reached maturity. (This is not counting the half-size increments that occur with the birth of a child and that, in my case at least, appear to reverse themselves as time passes. Twenty years after my last child was born, my foot has begun to inch back to its original size; I figure that if I can tough it out to the age of 90, I will fit into the shoes I wore to my junior high school dance.)

The point here is that, unlike the body’s torso and that even more unforgiving arena, the face, which remind us of time’s sickle whenever we look in the mirror, the foot does not rub our nose in our mortality. As a result, shoes can be purchased without putting the aging body into view, a fact capitalized on in shoe stores where the mirrors reach only to mid-calf. In this, shoes have a kinship with jewelry, another item that doesn’t take physical change into account. One of the reasons why jewelry is such a popular gift from husbands to wives is that the men can simply point and purchase. Shoes are a bit more complicated since they involve remembering the recipient’s size. (I do know a man who buys his wife shoes for her birthday, but, then, he’s a very smart lawyer who can remember that she’s a size 7.5 and likes anything from Charles Jourdan.)

Shoes are a profound accessory for additional reasons. They represent the foundation, literally speaking, of the self. They support us as we go to and fro in our daily lives, and can facilitate or impede that movement. It may seem that ease and comfort would be the desired attributes here, but not necessarily. In movement, as with other endeavors, difficulty can have its advantages.  Sometimes a careful, high-heeled step can empower, while a fast, sneakered walk can diminish. Does one want to be regal or ragtag? Shoes are the costumes not just of the feet but of the persona that inhabits them.