‘I like your shoes!’ she said. ‘They have red bits at the back!’

‘Thanks,’ I said, beating a swift retreat before she noticed that the ‘red bits’ were in fact open wounds filled with my encrusted blood, patching the backs of my ankles like some kind of visceral rash.

I should have said ‘They’re Christian Louboutin’.

Christian Louboutin's 'Ballerina' slippers, with an 8-inch heel

Vertigo

The shoe designer beloved by female celebrities everywhere (Jennifer Lopez has a whole song about them) is so proud of his trademark ‘red sole’ that he recently took erstwhile collaborator Yves Saint-Laurent to court over red sole copyright infringement. He’s also currently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Design Museum.

He’s notorious for being one of the first designers to insist, in the early 90s, on a heel that truly towers – his shoes average at about 4 1/2 inches; the highest peak at dizzying 6 (‘but mostly only dancers can wear them‘) and if you’re looking for someone to blame when you survey the heights on the high-street and sigh, you could be more unjust than to point your finger at this foot-obsessed Frenchman.

As a teenager, Louboutin’s eye was caught by a ‘No Stilettos’ sign at the Museum of Oceanic Art, Paris: ‘I wanted to defy that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.’ He’s stuck to this original image for most of his career: there are very few wedges or block heels in his collections; instead, his heels are thin, vertiginously high and splattered with those red soles.

Earthbound

Where such heights can lead is well illustrated by the fate that meets Little Women‘s sixteen-year-old Meg, who wears high heels to a ball – ‘The stupid high heel turned… It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get home’.

The sign Louboutin recalls inspiring him as a child

Yet this is the sort of height we’re talking about, for the 1860s. Poor Meg was rather dowdily earth-bound compared to Louboutin’s fantastical ‘ballerina’, whose eight-inch high ‘slippers’ are displayed above left. ‘Isn’t the classical dancing ballet slipper the ultimate heel? The heel which makes dancers closer than any other women to the sky, closer to heaven..’ waves Louboutin, airily, in explanation.

Elevation

He’s predictably fascinated with elevation – the exhibition is full of ‘pedestals’ and ‘birds’. But he’s gone a lot further than previous designers: Meg may have been dowdy in comparison, but even the flappers of the Twenties had modest block heels, and the Fifties heel looks almost mumsy nowadays.

One of the pairs exhibited here is accompanied by an apologia from Louboutin, thus: ‘This shoe is not suitable for walking in. You can only walk from the taxi to the nightclub, and back, on the arm of a man’. When asked about the point that women can’t run in his heels, intended for his ‘confident and empowered’ working women (apparently) Louboutin was incredulous: ‘Who runs at work?‘.

Yet he’s also fascinated by showgirls and ‘classic’ vintage-style women (such as his great admirer, Dita Von Teese, who makes a holographic appearance in this exhibition morphing into a Louboutin pump, in a rather literal appropriation of the fetish we’ll come to presently). Such women, he says, can dance and gyrate for hours at a stretch from atop dizzying heels – Louboutin learned all about this during an early career stint at the Folies Bergere, where showgirls used to put cuts of bloodless meat inside their heels to make them more comfortable.

Perhaps this is echoed in the sexualised red Louboutin sole (originally hastily-applied Chanel nail varnish) – a flash of red as easily representing the raw and bloodied foot itself as the raw and (un)bridled sexuality of the wearer.

Venus in Furs

Helmut Newton's Self Portrait With Wife and Models

‘A good shoe is one that doesn’t dress you but undresses you’, Christian reckons – a statement with which Helmut Newton (left) would undoubtedly have agreed. The short David Lynch / Louboutin collaboration film Fetish (2007), extracts from which are on display here, shows sequences of otherwise naked women wearing a series of ‘unwearable’ Louboutin shoes – following Louboutin’s conviction that the part of the female body most naturally fetishised is (you guessed it) the foot.

He’s even got a mini foot anatomy: one of the pumps on display here has a very low vamp, which was initially unpopular. ‘Then I realised, it’s because of the slit‘, he recalls – an unfortunate word, given that he means ‘toe cleavage’. Too much ‘slit’ apparently makes women feel ‘dirty’, but Louboutin’s well into it, although the instep is his favourite part of the foot, perhaps because of his famous belief that the appeal of the high heel is its approximation of the shape a woman’s foot assumes during orgasm.

The fetish

Of course, Sigmund Freud uses the shoe and foot as an illustration for his writings on the fetish – the mother’s shoe, says Sigmund, represents the penis the child originally assumed she has, and to fixate on it assuages castration anxiety. But symbolic castration via the foot pops up in Louboutin’s favourite fairy tale (whose centrepiece shoes he’s working on for an upcoming film):

‘[The eldest step-sister] could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.”

The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son […] He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red.’

– Cinderella, The Brothers Grimm

The mad but occasionally insightful Bruno Bettleheim sees the stepsisters here attempting to make their big feet more dainty, ‘and therefore prove their femininity’ through a symbolic castration (with a literal twist in stage versions, where they are usually in drag). The problem of the shoe being too dainty is one surprisingly near to Louboutin’s methods: although the average female foot size is a 5, he designs and constructs his shoes in size 4 ‘because I prefer to work on a small thing’.

‘He understands women and makes them feel like Cinderellas’ purrs Diane von Furstenberg on the designer. Indeed, it feels appropriate that stilettos, whose c20th renaissance is credited primarily to the 1950s couturier Roger Vivier (for Dior) owe their name to the Italian ‘dagger’ (hence their unpopularity with parquet flooring).

Domination

For me, the images in Fetish of these women crawling and sidling about in painfully unwearable shoes sums up this retrospective rather well: a fascination with immobility, and a craving for Fabulous Female Domination that suggests more power than it would actually have were it being negotiated from atop a pair of Louboutin pigalles.

But you look like you could walk down the treacherously lumpy terrain of my naked back, make me lick your Louboutin boots…

‘I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,’ said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica.

– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• Christian Louboutin, Retrospective at The Design Museum, London SE1. Until 9 July 2012.
]]> /2012/06/13/when-you-are-queen-christian-louboutin-at-the-design-museum/feed/ 0 11145 /2010/10/15/manolo-inferno/ /2010/10/15/manolo-inferno/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:59:34 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=29 We should have burned high heels instead of bras. I’m not sure why the bra was taken as a symbol of female repression: at least it serves a practical purpose. Bras allow us greater physical comfort and security – especially if you have larger breasts – protecting delicate nipples and posture, reducing the strain on the back and giving the freedom to do exercise without the fear of black eyes.

Ditching bras led to the hippy generation exposing their newly “liberated” breasts, much to the excitement of the male populous, but though the swinging sisters’ knockers were emancipated, their feet remained in chains. Brave souls fought the revolution from the floor up, rejecting those spiky torture devices in favour of Birkenstocks and Doc Martens. Rather than becoming a symbol of a new femininity, they were (and still are) decried as unfeminine, butch, ugly and a little bit silly. Aside from a core group of defiant activists, most women clung on to their high heels and attempted to teeter-totter their way to equality.

As anyone who has ever walked in high heels knows, it’s difficult, it hurts and you make slow progress in exchange for a bit of perceived power and some flattering glances. Which is a pretty good analogy for how women are hampered in general life, so why should we persist in adding to these problems by going along with something that limits us?



It’s important to admit that I own several pairs of high heels, and have even worn them on a number of occasions. There is not a single instance of doing so where, at some point, I haven’t wished I’d worn flats instead. I am pretty certain that the only reason I ever wear them is because I think they make me look “sexy”. Yet, I know that I don’t always feel sexy in them. For the first few minutes, yes. Then I often feel footsore, annoyed, uncomfortable and insecure. Which is hardly sexy as I understand it.

Understand this instead – high heels make me feel sexy because I have been socially conditioned to believe that they do. There’s a lot of wibble that is spouted over how high heels emphasise the curve of the calf, or mimic the way the foot appears in orgasm (I actually know very few people who look at their partners’ feet during climax). These are all smokescreen attempts to try and make the high heels = sexy equation make sense. In reality, we (men and women) think that they are sexy because society tells us that they are sexy. Because of the hundreds of thousands of images and descriptions of sex and sexual arousal that involve high heels. In the same way that black lace, Haagen Dasz, the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, red silk and feather boas are put in the big box of “sexiness” these are things that we have repeatedly conflated over and over and over again with sex until they are themselves signifiers of sexiness.

And who doesn’t want to be sexy? The problem is that high heels have become entwined with an idealised feminine sexuality that actually has very little to do with real women having real sex.

In order to be considered either feminine or sexy, we have to adopt these symbolically and socially appropriate signals to show off how attractive and womanly we really are.

High heels are a fetishised (often literally) and almost untouchably sacred shibboleth of accessing femininity: a litmus test for being a “real woman”. In fact, that act of wearing high heels for the first time, perhaps from our mother’s wardrobe, is almost a rite of passage. I never did this because my mother, also a tall woman, didn’t own any, which may go some way to explaining my perspective on heels. Being able to walk in high heels is a desirable skill, which women should learn in order to be “properly” sexy. Although it is also possible that if you feel you have to wear them in order to feel feminine then learning how to walk in them is a necessary survival mechanism to avoid falling over all the time.

The high heel, and walking on it, is part of the mask of constructed femininity, ways in which we contort our bodies into more socially-accepted shapes. Alongside corsets, padded bras, make-up and so on, the high heel is a tool in the Frankenstein workshop in which we create these fake shapes, themselves a distortion and extension of our own shapes to the point where our “natural” bodies look like failures, consistently being too big here or too small there.

We are addicted to high heels, and like many addictions, they are not good for us.

I have friends who adore high heels, including a friend who has several pairs she has never worn and dedicates a portion of her life to the process of breaking in new ones. The stock responses when I criticise high heels is that they make you taller, especially when compared with men, they make your legs look better and that they are pretty. I understand all of these points. I also understand that there’s a need to dig deeper into those reasons and appreciate that they centre more around feelings about power and self-worth than bits of leather and plastic on your feet.

Height is associated with power. We perceive “taller” as being better and physically attractive. It’s no wonder then that women, when they want to look powerful and sexy, try and be taller. Men too, but they have a genetic advantage, certainly over women, in that area, and a social constraint against trying too hard and fussing over their appearance.



The female dolls can't stand up without their high heels...

For women, no such luck – in fact, not trying enough and not “dressing up” properly for social occasions can sometimes cause offence, even amongst other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say especially from other women. Our heel addiction is something we push on other each other, like crazy drugged-up people giggling whilst encouraging our sober friends to try just one little inch. Then another, then another. There’s a tendency to blame mysterious (male) fashion gurus for difficult or challenging clothing that doesn’t suit or fit or just plain makes us feel silly. But the vast majority of the social force behind wearing heels comes from other women.

Which is actually a good thing. Because it means that we can stop it. We know that sexiness is something that is socially defined – certainly over time and across different cultures what it is to be sexy has looked totally different. And so too, what has been considered feminine. We can control it, by choosing to accept or reject these ideas. High heels have no more and no less control over about our femininity, our power or our sexiness than we, collectively, let them. In and of themselves, shoes are just bloody shoes. I realise that in saying this I am committing deep heresy and may as well hand in my women’s club membership card and will have any number of women ready to beat me to death with their precious designer spikes. This of course, only really goes to emphasise my point.

We need a heel amnesty. All of us, as one, should take them off and put on those beloved trainers that we only wear on a “scruffy” day, those boots that make us feel like we could kick the arse of the world, those flip flops that remind us of wandering along the beach, free for a day. If we all gave them up, we could all stop trying to compete in the height stakes and learn to accept ourselves – even just a tiny bit – for being the shape we are. Which is a natural, normal, comfortable and above all, powerful shape. Your shape: the one that you own and navigate the world in and which lets you run, jump and move like a human being rather than with the stiff gait of socially-conditioned sexiness.

Women of the world – buy comfy shoes! You have nothing to lose but a few inches!

And remember, it’s not height that it’s important. It’s stature.

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