Put on your high heeled sneakers and put your wig hat on your head
May not win a prize, I'm pretty sure you're gonna knock them dead
Put on your red dress baby 'cause we're going out tonight
lyrics © Robert Higgenbotham 1973
So there you are: fetishism, mutilation, pain. Fashion in a nutshell.
from William Klein's 1966 film
Qui êtes vous, Polly Maggoo?
Any woman, who through the use of high heeled shoes or other devices, leads a subject of Her Majesty into marriage, shall be punished with the penalties of witchery.
Fifteenth century English Law
How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.
Solomon's Song
Chapter 1, verse 1
I don't know who invented the high heel, but all women owe him a lot. Excuse the pun, but it was the high heel that gave a big lift to my career.
Marilyn Monroe
Icetwice Gallery, 25 High Street South, Olney, MK46 4AA
Objet trouvé – the shoe as a ready-made?
Objects became on the one hand like fetishes, like shrines of immanent magic, and, on the other, things with an essential personality divorced from their function. Our habit of thinking of things exclusively in terms of their use, of ascribing to them a specific role in a specific place, prevents us from seeing other, equally characteristic qualities which they possess. It is only "our certainty", as Proust said, that makes things "this rather than that". If the logical chain between meaning and function is severed, thus dislodging objects from their usual context, their essential personality can be seen to emerge. This chain is brittle and can easily be snapped. If the relationship between the object and its conventional context is dislocated, if the object is transposed into a strange environment, it seems to change into something new, previously unperceived and unimagined.
Frank Whitford – Extract from catalogue
for Metamorphoses, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 1978
NFS