Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather

In a room with dark walls and long, purple, velvet curtains, the high chandeliers emitting only the dimmest glow from above, I was a voyeur. It was warm, and in the background slow, hypnotic music played, as I peered at the objects of desire in all their leather, fur, jewels, ribbons and buckles... out of reach... untouchable. Sex, seduction, submission and power were recurring themes throughout. Pleasure and pain.

Shoes!

Not just any old shoes. Well, some old shoes, yes.... shoes that were centuries old... others which looked like cars (complete with tail-lights, the Pradas worn by Kylie), fairytale slippers (including Cinderella's glass Swarovski one created for the recent Disney film) and tiny, tiny Chinese shoes to fit women's feet that had been bound so as not to exceed the “ideal” length of 7cm. 7 cm! 

(I did feel slightly sick at this thought.)
(I still feel slightly sick.)

The lovely V&A, one of my favourite places in London, is hosting a fascinating exhibition – Shoes: Pleasure and Pain. I'm sure I wasn't alone in wanting to visualise the original wearer of the knee-high red leather boots, with 40 pairs of lace holes threaded with gold braid, lined in silk, so curvily shaped to emphasise her slim ankles and sensual calves. She would have been wearing them nearly a hundred years ago.

Other pictures formed in my head on seeing the Christian Louboutin/David Lynch collaboration, the ultimate in fetish shoes. Like ballet pumps with heels which bent round so they were parallel to the base of the shoe, these were made to be...

impossible to walk in, so that

     the wearer of them

          can only

               crawl.

And they were designed to be viewed from behind too.... their soles are completely transparent.

A picture is forming in your head as well, isn't it? It's difficult for it not to, I know.

Men's shoes too: I wouldn't want anyone to think this was a show that could only interest women. Glorious 1950s winkle-pickers with impossibly pointed toes, biker style boots with straps and buckles (which I noted were from Shelly's... a place much frequented by my friends and me in the '80s).  High-heeled and fancily decorated in beads and studs were the boots worn by those most rugged and macho of men: cowboys. Glam rock platform boots and jewel-encrusted mojaris worn by Indian royalty 200 years ago defied gender stereotypes too. If you've any interest in history, design and society, you can learn a huge amount just from looking at shoes through the ages and, like so many things, they're a reminder that much of what we think of as 'modern' has been done before - long before.

I knew I'd be on foot most of the day, and have to jump onto tube trains and walk down busy streets, so I wore some comfortably worn-in zipped ankle boots. The chunky heels are wearing down and the toes are square. But it was obvious from the display I saw that, throughout history, the most significant and desirable footwear is, of course, not actually meant to be walked in.

Look for me walkin' just any ol' way

Like the chubby girl who buys dresses three sizes too small as an incentive to lose weight, I bought myself some new Winter boots the other day in hope that I might actually go somewhere in them. A sort of 'have boots, will travel' thing:

...Well I might take a boat, or I'll take a plane
Might hitchhike, or jump a railroad train
Your kind of lovin' drives a man insane
So look for me walkin' just any ol' way...

Would these boots be imbued with magic powers that would remove me from my current life of virtual hermitude and transport me to new, exciting, vibrant places? Well, not exactly, but coincidentally not long after buying them (online, of course, seeing as I don't get out much) I did have to make several trips by foot. To the Co-op, the Post Office, the doctors, the hairdresser, that kind of thing. The irony was that I didn't even wear my new footwear for any of those; however, I did wear them when I was unexpectedly invited out for a drink the other evening.

I tottered and teetered my way down the road in them, unused to wearing such high wedges because you don't really need high wedges when you sit in a shed all day long.  I met my friend, who's so tall she doesn't need heels but wears them anyway. She has legs as long as a Barbie doll's – not literally, obviously, as that would actually make her very short and somewhat deformed – but you know what I mean. Luckily she was able to help me across the road as I tried not to wobble nor break an ankle in the path of an oncoming pantechnicon, and we managed to get from one side to the other side in just under five minutes.  Plus she was able to forewarn me about low beams in the pub, herself being skilled at ducking under them whilst carrying a pint of Guinness and a scampi dinner without losing any peas. Actually I'm such a short-arse compared to her that I still didn't have to duck, although I did so anyway as a gesture of solidarity and it probably looked rather sweet.  It also reminded me of one of the first visual jokes I ever saw, which I replicate quickly for you here:

So I came home unscathed, and in fact so used to being elevated on these heels as the evening wore on that when I finally took them off it felt so different that I fell over, and that's the story I'm sticking to.

I'm looking forward to making more exciting trips now that the magic boots seem to be working, so in a few weeks I'm going down to London for this.  Assuming I don't fall over in the path of a No. 44 or get hit by low flying signs (or ducks?!), then hopefully I'll be able to report back.

Jeepers creepers

There’s been a bit of a rock’n’roll theme in some of my fellow bloggers’ posts lately and it chimed in neatly with a strange and sudden yearning to get myself a pair of… you may think I’m mad, but… a pair of creepers. 

Well, I was looking through one of my sketchbooks from the early 1980s and found these small drawings…

…and, I dunno why, but I got hooked on the idea of slipping my feet into a pair of crepe-soled shoes, at least before I get too much older.  Can a woman of my age get away with wearing such things, with narrow jeans and a leopard print coat?  Do I care?  Hmm...I don’t want to end up like one of those old ladies who should have given up the lipstick and leather decades beforehand  - there are always one or two in every town, aren’t there? -  and who turn heads for completely the wrong reasons.  But I think  - ok: hope - there’s still time for me to make a few last stands against middle-aged convention.

At least I can buy them off the internet now too.  Back at the time of my little drawings, purchasing such exotic items meant taking the train down to London and heading for the rather cramped and gloomy branch of Shelly’s at Foubert’s Place in Carnaby Street.  Inside, boxes of weird and wonderful footwear for all of us who wanted to make fashion statements with our tootsies were stacked precariously and in no obviously logical arrangement from floor to ceiling.   In Shelly’s I indulged my love of some black patent lace-up boots with impossibly pointy toes, not the sort of thing you could buy in a small town Stead & Simpsons at the time.  It was my boyfriend who bought the creepers then – purple ones, red ones, some with pointy toes too - to be accessorised with dayglo green or pink socks, which we could also only find in the city shops (far too outrageous for the provinces).

You didn’t have to be into traditional rock’n’roll to wear creepers.  Early ‘80s fashion seemed, to me anyway, to be mostly about hybrids.  It was natural to mix and match various influences: a bit of punk here, a bit of glam there, a mélange of several different decades' styles, combining kitsch with chic and old with new.  I had no qualms about wearing a yellow polka dot 1950s dress under a leather motorbike jacket, along with black woolly tights and monkey boots, for instance. And, when I think about it, there were a lot of hybrid inspirations in the musical backdrop of the time too.   Rockabilly earned new credibility with bands like the Polecats and the Stray Cats...

(Who couldn't fall in love with Brian Setzer's hair too?)

  

Anyway, the creepers are on order and I just hope I’ll like them when they get here.  At least if I find I'm not brave enough to wear them out I can Stray Cat Strut round the living room in them and pretend I'm seventeen again...

Playing footsie

If anyone is in need of a little light relief  (I am) and would like a bit of a laugh at my expense, then please come and take a look at my feet…  

Before you ask me to peel off my socks I should explain that I mean the ones below, extracted from my ‘Ideas’ book of late 1982.

The ideas in question were (thankfully) not part of some elaborate ambition to be a shoe designer, so Manolo Blahnik had nothing to fear… but were compiled for a project given to students on the illustration course I was on at the time by the inspiring author, illustrator and poet, Colin McNaughton.  We were all in awe of Colin whose influence was highly motivating, even though then he was yet to impress the world with Preston Pig.  He came along to college once a month or so, and gave us themes to expand upon in any way we liked to help us work on our thought processes and techniques in a totally unrestricted way.  The theme here was (in case you couldn’t guess) ‘shoes’.  By the time we’d explored each subject fully with our minds and our pencils, the pages of our ‘Ideas’ books were full of anarchic scribbles, cuttings, doodles, finished paintings, notes, half-eaten cheese sandwiches, etc.  Some students may have taken them seriously, others abstractly; for me it was playfully.  I couldn’t resist the opportunity for stupid visual puns and corny (especially in this case, and that in itself is corny…) attempts at weird jokes. 

Other subjects we were dealt included 'Christmas', 'sex' and 'faces' (but not 'sex faces'...).  Sex was a good one - I might come back to that later.  Once I’ve taken my socks off.

Now - fancy a song?  A song with shoes in it? 

Shoes and handbags?

I’m not a shoes and handbags kinda woman at all, in spite of having a bit of a fetish for nice boots (as posted earlier), but I was going through my old portfolio again and came across these pictures I’d drawn in 1981 which reminded me of just what kind of shoes and handbags I possessed at the time.  So I’m just going to indulge that memory for a moment. 

The shoes were unearthed in a charity shop (naturally) and were possibly ‘60s.  Very uncomfortable of course (probably the wrong size to be honest but how we suffer for our art…)  And the handbag I remember well for being fabulously tacky with its silky leopard-print panel and the rest in shiny black patent  (clearly something of a penchant for shiny black patent has stayed with me since.)  Note the cigarette box poking out – Silk Cut by the look of it – I didn’t smoke for long but it was one of those things that so many students in my year seemed to do.  We even had a pet name for them:-  ‘oolies’ (not ‘oilies’ as in ‘oily rags: fags’ but definitely ‘oolies’ for some reason).  The college stairwells and lobbies used to stink of our Silk Cut and Rothmans, and occasionally something stronger too. (In the studios themselves, the smell of fixative spray and cow gum was enough to give you more than any nicotine or herbal high.)

Fashion-wise this was a great era for an impoverished student (though I was fortunate to be undertaking further education at a time when grants were the norm. Yes, we were actually given money to study and we didn't have to pay it back...)  I’d moved on from being predominantly punk by that time (and the patience it takes to put egg-white in your hair every day runs out eventually) - enjoying a wider range of music and clothes, the latter mostly being hunted out from charity shops which at that time were a fantastic and exceptionally cheap source of unusual old items, because so few people were interested in anything vaguely vintage or anti-fashion, it seemed.  And they didn’t have that overpowering smell of industrial-strength washing powder then, either…  I remember finding a black and pink dress with a  scenes of Paris print on it (oh, how I’d love that now) and with hair up in a Pebbles-type top-knot, (minus the bone – although chicken bones did feature a short while later during the tribal/goth/Southern Death Cult years, to be expanded on another time perhaps), lacy tights, the snakeskin slingbacks, plenty of black eye make-up, a plastic ring from a Christmas cracker and an old man’s cardigan to top it all off, the overall look must have been not unlike one of Diane Arbus’ photographic subjects or an extra from 'Summer Holiday' who'd got dressed in the dark.   Great escapism in a year remembered for (amongst many other unsavoury things) Peter Sutcliffe, the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, and Bucks Fizz winning the Eurovision Song Contest…

I was probably listening to this at the time too…