The foot is a liminal extremity, on the cusp between us and the soil from which it was so long believed that we sprang                                                    

Little wonder, van Driel-Murray says, that metamorphosis begins with the feet; it is in this area that mermaids, centaurs, satyrs and the Devil himself are distinguished from human beings.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, writers (beginning with the French novelist Balzac) have been telling us that Perrault must have made a mistake in interpreting the medieval sources for the Cinderella story, and that he misread the French word ‘vair’ (squirrel fur) for ‘verre’ (glass). Squirrel-fur slippers are a charming idea, but there is no evidence at all that this was the case. These writers clearly found it hard to accept the surrealism which lies at the heart of fairy stories. 

We can only assume that Perrault invented the slippers made of glass, precisely BECAUSE they were magical. 

The availability of plastic means that see-through shoes are nowadays much easier to make and to wear. In post-war Italy, however, a different set of economic circumstances produced a sandal which successfully showed off a woman’s foot. In 1947 the great Italian shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo, facing a shortage of materials in a country devastated by World War Two, did a lot of improvisation with textiles and other synthetic products. His famous Invisible Sandal was made from the nylon line used by fishermen.     

Shoes are objects of desire, and can also make their wearers desirable. A see-through shoe, which simultaneously conceals and reveals the foot, is inherently sexy. But there is nothing specifically erotic about Perrault’s treatment of the glass slipper in Cinderella, except that the Prince falls in love with her, and her shoe is the means by which they consummate their relationship. In other versions of the story however the shoe or the foot are more obviously a focus for eroticism. In none more so than the Chinese version of ‘Cinderella’, one of the earliest to survive.  Dating to about 890 CE, the story of Ye Xian features a young woman who loses her golden slipper during a New Year’s festival. It is then found the local King, who is so aroused by the tiny slipper that he falls in love with it, and promises to marry its wearer. And so it tuns out.

A lot of emphasis is placed on Ye Xian’s tiny foot, with the implication that this was enough to fuel the King’s passion. The assumption is that the young woman has been through the process of foot-binding –  breaking and tightly binding the feet of young girls in order to change their shape and size. Feet altered by foot-binding were known as lotus feet, and the shoes made for them were lotus shoes. For the women who had undergone the procedure it was very painful to walk.

Perrault nowhere suggests that Cinderella’s feet were very small, but the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century certainly do. In the tale of Ashputtel (‘Dirty Ash-Girl’) the stepsisters are urged by their mother to cut off their toes and heels  so that when the Prince comes searching for his lost love her tiny slipper will fit them. Who needs feet anyway?  ‘You’ll never have to go anywhere on foot again once you’re Queen,’ she says. But the prince spots the blood on their stockings, so the desperate trick doesn’t work. 

Eroticism is one of the most prominent themes in the story of women’s shoes. I’ll be exploring this more fully in the next section, in the piece about the stiletto. But here is a taster. A shoe is often the last item to be removed when women are undressing. The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes exploits this detail in his Lysistrata, where the women of Athens go on a sex-strike in order to persuade their menfolk to end a war against the Spartans. ‘I’m just taking my shoes off!’ (Lysistrata 950) is the last exclamation heard from one of the strikers, who has been goading her husband into a sexual frenzy by pretending she is about to hop into bed with him.  After that she runs off and leaves him to his agony. 

Metaphorically and in real life, shoes are associated with movement and travel. In Greek myth the god Hermes (Mercury in Roman parlance) serves as the courier of the gods, and for this reason is an inveterate traveller. A change-maker and a boundary-crosser, he supervises roads and trade, conducts brides to their weddings, and escorts dead souls across the ultimate boundary into the Underworld. In this Greek pot-painting he is shown in his travelling gear – a short cloak, a broad-brimmed hat to protect him from the sun, and magical winged boots. He is carrying a herald’s wand, which has intertwined snakes at the top of its shaft. 

So it understandable that in a satire by the Syrian-Greek writer Lucian, Hermes is depicted as a kind of tour guide leading his clients into Hades, and having particular difficulty with a stroppy deceased cobbler called Micyllyus.  

Coming-of-Age – the transition from childhood to adulthood – is  frequently associated with
shoes. In many societies, both past and present, marriage is the most significant life change attributed to a woman, and as we have seen shoe symbolism is often present at weddings. Cinderella’s shoe-story on one level works as an elaborate expression of a young woman’s social and sexual journey.

The journey made by Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz, released in 1939, is rather different. Dorothy Gale is an adolescent girl raised by her aunt and uncle on a remote farm in Kansas. When a wicked old woman threatens to euthanise her dog Toto she resolves to escape to a land where she and her beloved pet will be understood and appreciated.  Her wish is granted by means of a tornado, which whisks her and Toto to the technicolor land of Oz, where the good witch Glinda magically transports a pair of ruby slippers onto her feet, and tells her to follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City. There she will be able to find her way back home. This, it seems, is the whole point of Dorothy’s journey: to get back to where she started and realise how fortunate she is.

The Emerald City, when Dorothy and her friends finally reach it, proves to be a bleak modernist settlement ruled by a sham Wizard who pronounces banal platitudes while handing out medals and diplomas  Whatever political allegories the story contains – and there have been a number of theories –  the message for Dorothy seems pretty straightforward: if ever I go looking for my heart’s desire again, she announces, I needn’t look any further than my own backyard.  This, Gilda tells her, is a truth which she needed to discover for herself. ‘Now tap your heels together three times and think, There’s no place like home.’

So Dorothy gives up any wild longings she once cherished and settles back into life on the farm. It’s a depressing tale, in my view.  American isolationism is one of the threads that runs through it. Women’s place in the home is another. Dorothy’s magic slippers, which promised so much, have taken her on a journey to nothing more exciting than acceptance. In this respect it is a classic coming-of-age story. For both males and females this often involves a ritual which allows the indulgence of tempestuous yearnings, before people are slotted into their prescribed social roles as adults. At least marriage is not specifically mentioned: Dorothy finds friends but not lovers in the course of her travels. But there can be little doubt that marriage is on the cards for her.

Not all footwear is suitable for travel, however, or indeed for everyday walking. The high-heeled shoes which became fashionable for women in the early twentieth century were certainly not designed for ease of movement. Already in 1899 the American sociologist Thorsten Veblen was arguing that shoes like these were created for show rather than for practical use. 

Attitudes to working women have changed enormously since the early twentieth century, and businesses which try to enforce high heels as part of a dress code for their female employees are being increasingly challenged.  

But there is nothing to stop women from volunteering to wear them. I’m constantly surprised by the number of female politicians who feel they have to turn out in stilettos on important occasions. These include the otherwise sensible Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland, who was celebrated for her collection of high heels. 

So I was glad to see that in the recent political thriller Hostage, (Netflix 2025), the Prime Minister played by Suranne Jones generally appears in public in stilettos (quite accurately), but is repeatedly shown removing them when she retreats to private space, and seeking out a pair opf trainers.

It is a contested area, but the French shoemaker Roger Vivier (1907-1998) is often credited with having invented the stiletto heel in the 1950s. He’d become known in Britain after he designed the shoes worn by Queen Elizabeth II at her coronation in 1953 – not exactly stilettos, but still quite high (as though she didn’t have enough problems with the huge crown and the ermine robe). In photographs of the occasion it’s almost impossible to see them because of her long skirt. Amazingly Vivier, at the age of 30, had also designed the shoes worn by the Queen’s mother at the coronation of the late King George VI. 

As Eleanor Cummins points out in her ‘The Stiletto Heel’ article quoted above, it is no coincidence that the stiletto heel and the skyscraper flourished in the same post-war period: both of them depended on the widespread use of steel.  A heel as high and as slender as the stiletto can only support the weight of the human body if it has a steel shaft at its core. 

‘Killer Heels’ says it all, really. If stilettos can turn a woman into an empowered and desiring subject, then it’s little wonder that they are often associated with the femme fatale. 

Born in 1898 in Bonito, a small town in the Southern  Appennines 80 kms east of Naples, Salvatore Ferragamo was the 11th of 14 children. His family had a small farm, and was quite poor. As a boy he spent hours in the shop of the local shoemaker, watching him at work; at the age of nine, because one of his sisters didn’t have any new shoes for her first communion, he stayed up all night and made her a pair.  His parents weren’t keen on him taking this kind of work up full-time: in the early 20th century it was seen as a very downmarket job. ‘My parents were humble, but even they saw a shoemaker as the lowest of the low.’ It was Ferragamo himself who eventually made shoemaking a glamorous profession. When he was eleven he managed to persuade his parents to apprentice him to a shoemaker in Naples. Returning to Bonito when he was twelve he opened his own shop in the hallway of the family home; he used to leave the door open so that passers-by could see his shoes, and see him making them.

I love feet, they talk to me. ..  A good foot is a masterpiece of divine workmanship

Men’s shoes are on the whole very conservative. It is generally only in the realm of male-to-female-transvestism that we encounter male footwear that embraces ‘feminine’ traits. Here, as with other items of clothing worn by male cross-dressers, the exaggerated style amounts to a parody of femininity.

‘Kinky Boots’ has done much to popularise this niche fashion choice. It tells the story of the real-life businessman Steve Pateman, and his heroic efforts to save the shoe-manufacturing enterprise W.J.Brooks of Earls Barton, which had been in his family for four generations. By 1993 the demand for traditional men’s brogues was in decline, and like other Northamptonshire footwear businesses it was threatened with closure. Then Steve took a telephone call from a Folkestone factory wanting to place an order for women’s shoes that could be worn by men.

As a result the business switched to the manufacture of high-heeled thigh boots for Drag Queens, and in February 1999 was featured in an episode of the BBC2 documentary series Trouble at the Top. This inspired a film, and then a Broadway musical. In the process, Steve learnt to wear (and walk in) the thigh boots, and posed in them for the firm’s catalogue. 

Kinky boots are hard to find among the regular shoes designed for men, be the latter straight, gay or anything in between. The nearest you get to them is in the wares of Italian fashion designers Dolce and Gabbana. Their clothes can be quite exotic in their content, but in their structures they tend to follow traditional lines. This goes for their shoes as well. 

The appropriation by women of styles worn originally by men was to a large extent an outcome of the twentieth century women’s movement. Three kinds of shoe in particular, made in the UK, were very popular: the Brogue, the Desert Boot, and the Doc Martens.                                                                           

Derived from the Gaelic word for shoe, bròg or bróg, the brogue was originally a country shoe worn in Scotland and Ireland. Later it was adopted by upper class men practising country pursuits – huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ – with perforations designed to allow the shoe to dry more quickly. By the twentieth century it had become acceptable to wear brogues in town, and in the 1920s women’s brogues became available. By the 1950s they were being sported by Hollywood stars such as Katharine Hepburn. Over the years the perforations have become smaller, and the shoes much slimmer. 

The shoe company Church’s manufactures some of the classiest brogues in Britain. Its history goes back to 1617, when Anthony Church began making shoes by hand in Northampton, a town which was already known for its thriving shoe-making establishments. Two hundred and fifty years later, in 1873, his great-grandson Thomas Church set up a factory in Northampton, and by 1907 it was exporting its shoes widely to Europe and the U.S. It opened its first shop in London in 1921, and started making brogues for women. In 1999, amid the general slump in the Northampton shoe industry, Church’s was bought by the Prada Group, and survived. It now has 14 stores in Britain.