Japanese geta sandals from www.allposters.com

Shoes are our connection to the earth. To walk in someone’s shoes is to understand what it’s like to be them. If you click the heels together they might take you home. According to cliché they induce spending frenzies beyond rationality in women. They can alter the way you walk and think about yourself. They are personal - Prince Charming knew the glass slipper could belong to one girl and it would fit only her feet. They are hard to buy for other people: not just because they’re the only thing that cannot be worn if not fitted properly, but because our attraction to them is often intensely subjective. They can ruin everything if they hurt. According to John Lock “Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip".

And the shoe that transcends national, cultural, class, gender and historical boundaries like no other? The thong. Last week I went to an interesting seminar called Thongs: From Function to High Fashion, by Lindie Ward of the Powerhouse Museum. She traced the thong through ancient Pakistani, Japanese, Indian, Egyptian, African and Burmese cultures, through to contemporary fashion.
She said there are an estimated six million rubber thongs floating in the earth’s oceans and that the left sides float right and the right sides float left: meaning on Australia’s east coast we end up with more right feet sides, and on the shores of NZ they have their left feet partners.

The oldest footwear artefact, found in Colorado, is said to date to 9000BC, and indeed had a strap between the toes. The Egyptians had inscriptions on the soles of thong-sandals: messages of love or phrases like ‘follow me’ that were imprinted in the sand with each step. An ancient Hindu thong she showed was elevated with ledges so as to cause as little harm as possible when walking on the ground, and had a lotus flower at the strap between the toes that opened up with each step, thanks to a lever beneath the soul.

Although plastic surgery on the feet is not uncommon today, Western Europeans didn’t show their toes until the 1930’s, and not in daywear until the 1950’s. Even then open shoes didn’t really enter the field of fashion until the 1960’s. In Australia the rubber thong became an icon representing freedom, egalitarianism, comfort and outdoor practicality, but was an anti-fashion statement for many and some restaurants and clubs today still have a ‘no thongs’ policy. Alan Davies even offered the following advice as a fool-proof plan for not getting a job: “in the event of an interview wear flip-flops.”

So they were very slowly adapted, but the thong has entered both high and mainstream fashion, not looking like it’s going away soon. Gucci is said to be one of the first to bring the thong to the catwalk and that Manolo Blahnik thing in the 1990’s saw the lavishly bejewelled stiletto thong a craved item for women worldwide. More recently, the Brazilian brand Havaianas introduced an inescapable uniform of brightly coloured rubber thongs. Western cultures realised how cheap and easy the three-point construction is to manufacture and in 2001 China allegedly produced 8 billion of them.

Here’s James’ lovely feet on a park bench in Paris. James doesn’t have any foot odour at all. It’s weird. But he’s lovely.



“For goodness' sake, I have flip-flops on. It's all right. Jesus wore sandals.”
(Ashley Smith)