shoes

I was so intrigued by the Christian Louboutin exhibition at F.I.T., it led to me rummaging around our catalogue in pursuit of further information. One thing I discovered was an authoritative scholarly work on the shoe industry in Europe, with focus on fashion rivals France and England. Giorgio Riello’s A foot in the past: consumers, producers and footwear in the long eighteenth century offers significant information about the textile and production history of shoes and boots.

In the process of locating this book, however, I began to see how shoe history researchers could become easily confused with their findings. The problem lies in our Library of Congress Subject Headings. The obvious term to use is shoes. Yet there is another term that was adopted at a later date: footwear. To do a thorough search, it helps to search both terms. The tricky part is in the age difference between the terms; shoes will yield more citations because it’s older and been around longer, yet newer, and often more up-to-date works on the subject will only show up under the heading footwear.

Now, for the even more tricky fact! When one searches shoe industry and footwear industry, more citations show up under the newer footwear industry heading. Again, this is undoubtedly because so much more has been researched and written about this subject, as with all costume history, over the last ten years or so.

The exhibition of Christian Louboutin shoes at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology is a must-see for those who love or loath high heels. French designer Louboutin gained fame for learning well from the “everything old is new again” maxim. His shoes have his signature red sole, a convention that may come down from the days of King Louis XIV.

At the same time, despite his historical references to footwear from the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries (see the illustration above), Louboutin moves his shoe designs from the pretty to the provocative. The exhibition text delightfully suggests the sexual and other connotations that spring to mind when we look at a pair of spiked heels.

Alas, I belong to the legion of women who have had to put heeled shoes behind them. It didn’t help that I never had the kind of legs that looked slinky when thrust into a pair of really high heels. Yet this exhibition allows for plenty of fantasizing. To give yourself a preview, in order to get in the mood for a trip to F.I.T., go to Google Images and put in Christian Louboutin’s name. Prepare to be dazzled—and more than a little bit excited…

Hosiery and shoes are another two foundations for contemporary feminine dress, and this year’s runway models sport tinted hose and high heels that made a winning combination in the 1920s. A decade earlier, Paul Poiret introduced women to flesh-colored hosiery, considered daring in that time. Nowadays, black-tinted hose possesses the cachet of being more dressy and alluring. A book called Socks and Stockings offers a pictorial history of hosiery, with some fascinating asides. A number of Fashion Week’s best runway outfits were completed with the same kind of stockings and heels that can be found in the illustration below.

What revelations did New York Fashion Week make? The fashion industry laid hints in advance. The September 2007 issue of Vogue foresaw some trends: Caroline Herrera’s English country girl clothes, FutureFashion’s tribute to “green” wear, with outfits made from soy, hemp, and bamboo (even Donatella Versace made a contribution), and nods to sensible 20s through 60s retro looks. As usual, however, I try and fail to find a discernable pattern to the women’s wear presentations. What interests me most, however, is what will translate into realistic street wear: what designs will appear in the stores for our consumption. Judge for yourself, look at nytimes.com/fashionweek.