An ongoing exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum explores extremes of footwear from around the globe, in 200 pairs of shoes

If you happen to be on Cromwell Road in London, United Kingdom, then let your feet take you to the Victoria and Albert Museum. To be more precise, to this exhibition titled Shoes: Pleasure and Pain. Among the 200 plus pairs of footwear exhibited until January, 2016 are a sandal decorated in pure gold leaf originating from ancient Egypt and contemporary creations from Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin. The exhibit explores three different themes: transformation, status and seduction. Transformation looks at the mythical aspect of shoes in folklore. Status examines how impractical shoes are worn to represent a privileged lifestyle. Finally, seduction explores the concept of footwear as a representation of sexual empowerment and pleasure. Talk about history meeting its contemporary.

Shoes long ago eclipsed their primary function – to protect feet. For thousands of years shoes have elicited extremes of both pain and pleasure. As an object, the shoe has transformed from its functional origins to become wearable art. Some of the more extreme shoes featured in this exhibition even demand questions as to their feasibility to be worn. More contemporary exhibits include Zaha Hadid’s Nova shoes, constructed with a 16.5cm heel. Vertiginous to an extreme, the towering heights of heels are not, however, a modern-day phenomenon, states this insightful article in The Scroll.

Renaissance Italy provides one of the most striking instances of the shoe’s extreme history. Venetian women of status popularised the wearing of a style called the chopine. These platform shoes were often crafted from wood or cork. And 15th-century Venetian gentlemen were very keen for their wives to wear these extremely high shoes, according to Elizabeth Semmelhack, senior curator at The Bata Shoe Museum. This was because of the way it hindered their mobility – and therefore, the idea goes, they would be less likely to run off with other men. Indeed, very often these women would have to be accompanied by attendants to ensure that they didn’t topple over. Chopines would be an average of around five and a half inches but their height was rumoured to have reached up to 20 inches.

Not only did the elevation project the wearer’s social standing, but the height served to protect them from the dirty streets of Venice. As elevations became more extreme, Venetian sumptuary laws were even brought in to address the ridiculous nature of these shoes. In 1430 the Venetian Major Council forbade the wearing of chopines that were more than three and a half inches in height. Chopines were by this point condemned as an insult to God, perilous to the wearer’s souls as well as their bodies.

Although the chopine was highly gendered and extreme shoes were more usually associated with women, men were, historically, also avid heel wearers, as Rebecca Shawcross reveals in her historical overview of shoes. This was epitomised perfectly by France’s King Louis XIV, whose red-heeled shoes became an emblem of political allegiance: aristocrats wore red heels to demonstrate their allegiance to the King.

Read the rest of the article here.