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Tuesday 23 July 2013

shoes 2013

shoes 2013 Biogarphy

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Speaking of shoes and buskers (street performing), I pulled into Carmel, Ca. one day in 1983 in my school bus, and decided to try to busk their main drag. I set up and began to busk, and had a small crowd gathering when about 3 songs into the set, a cop showed up and told me it was illegal to play music for money in Carmel city limits. He said Carmel had some wacky laws, such as no jukeboxes were allowed that charged money, you are not allowed to sit on fire hydrants, and women were not allowed to wear heels over 6 inches. And apparently laws regulating the height of women's shoes, date back to at least the 15th century in Venice. What do shoes mean? Why would certain shoes be banned for some and not others? That is the politics of shoes. In Sienna during the 15th century, it was illegal for anyone other than prostitutes to wear flat shoes or slippers in public.
Laws were enacted in France during the 16th century regulating shoe tip length. Princes, again, could wear 24 inch tips, and gentlemen, 6 inch tips. (I am chuckling thinking of the inherent penis size comparisons these protruding shoe tip lengths must have generated in their time). Akin to the sheer impracticality of 24 inch shoe tips, we see pedestals and high heels, and their legal regulation, for women. In the 18th century, it was supposedly a crime and grounds for marriage annulment if a woman "tricked" a man into marrying her by wearing high heels, whatever that could possibly mean!
In Venice in the 16th century, 13 inch shoes that put women on pedestals, called "chopines," were in vogue. And Queen Catherine de Medici was said to have worn "chopine" shoes in the Renaissance, because she was short and wanted to appear larger. Unlike the modern high heel shoe, where a woman has part of her foot on the ground and another part of her foot unnaturally raised, chopines simply put the entire shoe atop a walking pedestal. The utility of wobbling around on 13 inch pedestals is questionable, but if the utility was to show your social status rather than to walk, then they served their purpose just fine.
In the 16th century, women were balancing on all kinds of weird contraptions. An elevated "shoe protector" resembling low stilts had women tripping as they tried to walk, and by the 18th century, women were wearing elaborate metal "protectors" for their elegant shoes, to keep them from getting dirty by touching the ground. These shoe protectors give new meaning to the concept of allowing women to stand on their own two feet!
Much of shoe elitism has to do with class distinctions. Before the French Revolution, large, bare feet were negatively associated with poor peasants and workers. It was the elite who could afford to have small limbs and tiny feet. And wealthy children were forced to wear shoes to keep their feet smaller, just as China's foot binding for women. In China, from the 10th century to the 20th century, women's feet were bound and literally deformed, and women left crippled, for this "feminine" fashion. By age 3, a girl would have all but her first toe broken, then her feet were bound tightly with cloth to keep her feet from growing any bigger than 4 inches. Rich women had their feet bound in China for over 1,000 years as a sign of wealth and prestige. These little deformed feet were highly eroticized.
This eliteness of small feet became something women latched onto as a symbol of femininity, of privilege, and also of weakness and dependence on servants, and a Victorian type of female submission that indicated wealth. This feigned weakness and helpless dependence upon others' servitude are considered very sexy traits in women, even in mainstream American culture today. Look at Paris Hilton. As weird as it sounds, small feet on women are a reassuring symbol to men that they are in charge, and thus men support the continual eroticism of small feet on women to date, as a symbol of female dependence upon men, is my take on it.
Working class folks in the U.S. during the Civil War often went barefoot from spring to fall. They usually had shoes for school and church, but they did not wear them when they did not need to. There are reports of many folks who never got a pair of their own shoes until their teens, before commercial shoes were available. But with the industrialization of shoe making, more people were able to afford shoes in the mid-1800's. And for the first time, different patterns of the right and left shoes were standardized. To compete with other shoemakers, styles emerged, along with pointy toed shoes, which crammed feet into unnatural shapes for fashion. In past centuries, those 12+ inch pointy shoes had the point start after the tip of the toes. In current shoes, though, the point starts well into the toes, compressing toes into 1/2-1/3 the space they naturally take up. Even today, many women have toes that are crumpled together, with one toe laying upon another, due to pointed toes and raised heels that jam the feet into the pointy toe area, with no room.

shoes 2013