red shoes

After yesterday’s tedious examination of commodity fetishism and ‘bling’ consumerist culture, I find myself writing about one of my favourite fetishised commodities: the red shoe. What a joy it is to give a flick of flame to any outfit. I don’t even know how many pairs I have. Here’s one of my favourites - not quite the sparkling Ferragamo stilettos but definitely red. I also love at the moment red shoes paired with red socks or stockings.

I think I was 8-years-old when I first chose a pair of shoes. They were bright red and plastic and I was ecstatic. I show and telled them at school and was the envy of all my friends. I immediately regretted it when I agreed to lend them to a girl named Simone who begged me and said she would return them the next day. I didn’t want to part with them but had already said yes so I handed them over. And never saw them again.

Simone told me her dog ate them, which was the only time I have ever actually heard that excuse used for real. I guess a dog is more likely to eat shoes than homework, so maybe she was telling the truth. But I never recovered.

Years later, when I was in highschool, the teacher introduced a new student to the class named Simone, who looked oddly familiar. When I figured out that it was the same girl I confronted her in the middle of class. She denied ever having seen any red shoes of mine but I wouldn't let it go. It became a bit of an in-joke in that class, the teacher would always say that the worst thing anyone could do to anyone would be to take their red shoes.

Because red leather was initially very expensive to buy, red shoes were a symbol of status for both men and women. But red has long been associated in many cultures with passion, power and sex, and the red shoe has appeared recurrently in the imagination in relation to freneticism. In the Brothers Grimm version of the Snow White story, the wicked stepmother is

forced to wear ret-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she falls down dead. It is her punishment for being too heated herself with envy over Snow White, and for letting that passion get out of control.

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, The Red Shoes, also warns about the dangers of vanity. A child named Karen is unable to remove her red shoes and unable to stop dancing in them. The shoes dance her feet across meadows and forests for months. Wretched and exhausted, she finally begs an executioner to chop off her feet: "Don't chop my head off," she says, "for then I can never repent of my sins. But pray, pray chop off my feet with the red shoes!" He does, and the chopped off red shoes dance away with her feet still in them.

“Put on your red shoes and dance the blues” sings David Bowie in that fantastic track Let’s Dance. The video, shot in Australia, shows some young Aboriginals who find a pair of red shoes in the desert. Like in so many narratives, they make their wearer dance. The shoes bring the young

couple a new cosmopolitan lifestyle which they love, but the pleasure to be had in material indulgence is transient. After they get rid of the shoes by stamping them into the dirt, they dance freely on a head land. Here, red shoes are a temptation to be resisted.

But for Marilyn Monroe, they were to be embraced. The iconic diamante stilettos in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (right) were made for her by Salvatore Ferragamo and reportedly sold for over US$50 000 in the most recent auction of Monroe’s pieces.

A few decades earlier Ferragamo had also made perhaps to most famous red shoes ever – the magic ruby slippers that take Dorothy Gale back home in the 1939 film

version of The Wizard of Oz. In the novel the shoes had been silver but they were made ruby red for the film to take advantage of it being in colour, and perhaps to suggest the empowerment that red shoes connote.

And what an iconic image those shoes became.

All those girls
Who wore the red shoes
Each boarded a train that would not stop
Stations flew by like suitors and would not stop

From Anne Sexton’s poem The Red Shoes