MORE THAN ANY OTHER ITEM OF CLOTHING, shoes put us in regular and direct contact with the world that exists beyond our own bodies. They are often associated with physical or metaphorical journeys, and with the boundaries which we cross in the course of those journeys. Changes in footwear come into play at the point where we are about to step over important dividing-lines, and enter a different world – passing, for example, from childhood to adulthood, from indoors to outdoors, or from a secular to a sacred space. The stories which we tell about our shoes are almost inevitably stories about ourselves, the experiences we have had, and the paths we have chosen.

During lockdown in the summer of 2020 I wore these grey Puma trainers every day when venturing out of the house for  my ‘permitted exercise’. The following summer I bought several new pairs of trainers, and I’ve never worn the Pumas since, though I used to be fond of them. But I haven’t thrown them away. The memories of that time are nearly all bad, but those grey Pumas remind me how much things have improved since I was wearing them every day. I didn’t think I would ever live a normal life again, but I was wrong.

At one time in the UK bare feet were equated with poverty. My mother, born in Manchester in 1915, used to tell me stories about children of her age who couldn’t go to school because it wasn’t their turn to wear the shoes. Nowadays we certainly haven’t abolished poverty, but in the UK it is much less likely to be associated with bare feet. This is largely because plastic shoes were invented in the 1940s, and canvas shoes are now widely worn as well. Today the urge to throw off convention and constraint is the most common motive for casting off our shoes, though it is still rare on city streets. Bare feet are generally confined to parks, meadows and beaches.

The best-known fairy tale involving shoes is, of course, Cinderella. 345 variants of this story were identified by the British anthropologist Marian Roalfe Cox in 1893. In these, Cinderella has many different names: the key element uniting all of the stories is the identification of the heroine by means of a shoe. The version which is most familiar to people in Europe today is the one published by the French writer Charles Perrault in 1697,  ‘Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre’ – ‘Cendrillon, or the little glass slipper.’ As far as we know, it was Perrault who introduced glass as the material from which the vital slipper was made.

Sometimes a shoe serves to identify a specific individual: like fingerprints or DNA, it answers the question, ‘Who was here?’. In the Perrault version of the Cinderella story, when the heroine flees the ball on the stroke of midnight she loses one of her glass slippers. The Prince, who has fallen in love with his anonymous dance partner, sends a steward to visit every house in the country, trying to find the young woman whose foot the slipper will fit. By this time Cinderella has resumed her position as household drudge and is wearing her old worn out clothes. In these she is unrecognisable. But as soon as her foot slides snugly into the shoe, everyone knows who she is: the unknown beauty whom the Prince danced with at the ball.

In these expressions the shoe isn’t offering a clue to someone’s identity, but is standing in for the whole person – he or she is represented by their shoes. 

As time went on I began to fit into his shoes 

Phil Davies reading his as yet unpublished memoirs at the Soho Poly, London, 5 December 2024

A similar construction of female identity can be detected in ‘My Nurse’, by the German/Swiss surrealist sculptor Meret Oppenheimer. The piece may have been inspired by the artist’s own nursemaid.  The woman, whoever she was, is represented by her white high heels, and is served up on a platter like a roast chicken. Perhaps, like Vasconcelos’ ‘Marilyn’, she is tied into her role as a female companion who is both sexy and good at cooking. Perhaps she is being offered to us as a dish concocted for our consumption.

When worn by an individual, shoes can be a compelling signifier of social aspirations. Examples abound, but none more powerful in their impact  than the snazzy yellow brogues bought by the cornet-player Levee in August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In the 2020 film version, set in Chicago in 1927, the story begins with Levee (wonderfully played by Chadwick Boseman in his last film) dashing across the street to gaze at the shoes in a shop window.

Levee is different – energetic, creative, eager to give his nightclub audiences a style of music that stands out from the stereotypical ‘black’ numbers they expect. He thinks that white men will accept him on his own terms, but the other band members know he is wrong. All that white people want is the comfy old stereotypes, with black musicians kept in their allotted place.

The shoes are a symbol of Levee’s restless ambition and craving for cultural and social mobility.  Both fateful and fatal, they ignite tensions between the players that finally erupt in needless and tragic violence. In the end Levee’s gorgeous yellow brogues prove to be his downfall.

Glass slippers work very well as receptacles for flowers, or as Roman grave goods designed to assist a deceased wife on her journey to the Underworld. But as real-life footwear they are impossible, unless you want to stand in one place while wearing them. In 2018 two young American women commissioned a shoemaker to provide them with a pair of genuine glass slippers. In their trials, their volunteer fell downstairs, twice.

In our own times British fashion designer Stella McCartney reveals the foot through a textile web attached to high heels made from synthetic leather. This didn’t come about because of a shortage of animal products, but because McCartney is a vegan and an environmentalist. She has never used leather or fur in her garments. As of 2024 in sourcing ‘vegan’ leather she is switching to waterborne and solvent-free polyurethanes ‘that are less energy and water intensive and are safer for people to work with’.