Shoes
August 12, 2007
Itty Bitty Shoes
Long, long ago, when I went to Toronto and saw We Will Rock You with Dale and stayed in the room with the giant blue bathtub, I also visited the Bata Shoe Museum where, I bought these spiffy souvenirs:
The one in the middle is, as you can tell, a key chain pendant. The one on the top is, as you probably can't tell, a hammer: the heel is weighted so you can use it to pound nails, though the friend who visited the museum with me bought one too and said it broke almost as soon as he got it home, when his toddler dropped in on the carpet, so it probably won't work well for hammering nails. The one on the bottom has no function at all; it's just a pretty thing I admired, which, after all, is what Oscar Wilde said is what art really is.
Posted by Holly at 9:46 AM | Comments (4)
August 6, 2007
What I'm Reading Meme
I started this blog entry more than two weeks ago--in fact, in a conversation about this book, I told someone I'd finished the entry and would be posting it the next day--and that was two weeks ago. At the time, I really did plan to post this the next day--but then I looked at what I'd written and decided this book deserves a more interesting and thorough write-up. Here it finally is.
Anyway, here's a meme I've seen going around, along with its rules:
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 123.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
* Do not dig around for the 'cool' or 'intellectual' book on your shelf. Do not go to the other room to find an old textbook. Just pick up whatever is lying at hand.
I grabbed the book I was currently reading: Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil. It is a thoroughly fabulous book and I plan to blog all about it eventually, but for now I'll focus on the chapter in which page 123 occurs: Chapter 5, "War and Wellingtons: Military Footwear in the Age of Empire" by Alison Matthews David.
I have to fudge a little: page 123 is actually an illustration of some French "support the troops!" propaganda poster from World War I, so I'm providing four sentences from page 124:
Another telling design feature is the heel of the boot, which has a small, inverted metal horse-shoe shaped reinforcement hammered into the leather itself. Unlike officers, soldiers were beasts of burden who carried packs weighing up to sixty pounds. Like the horses that served in wartime, they were literally "shod" to protect their feet from lameness. The thin, smooth sole with a few small, invisible nails were the hallmark of a man who sat on a horse, rode in a carriage, or wore his boots on newly paved urban streets.
And there you have it: the origin of the term "well-heeled" as a descriptor of superior wealth and up-bringing: it literally refers to the well-crafted, solid, carefully maintained heels on an officer's boots. Because not only were the heels attached to expensive boots, they were also equestrian in style and function (even for officers in the navy), which announced their wearer as a man who owned (or aspired to own, with some chance of success) horses, as well as stables to keep them in and land own which to build the stables.
The beautifully photographed and presented illustrations (this is both a coffee-table art book and a collection of scholarly essays) demonstrate just how cloddish, clumsy and unattractive were the boots of working-class and enlisted men. In other words, the contemporary belief that men should have big feet, because "big feet equal big other things" did not hold true for earlier times. Rather, men
who had them were proud to show off their "neat" small feet and suffered accordingly from corns, hammer toes, bunions, ingrown toenails and other painful conditions. Toes were crammed into the tips of boots that alternated between exaggeratedly square and round-toed models.... Medical men compared fashionable male footwear with the barbarous practices of tight-laced corsets for women and Chinese footbinding.... While the British "Tommy" [of World War One] was said to have a "special affection for his boots" because they were his "best friends" in wartime, his boots still marked him as a working-class man. They had thick, metal-studded soles and laced up to the ankles. Most importantly, they had an unfashionably broad toe. A small, narrow "smart" foot held cachet. By the early 20th century, infantry soldiers complained not that their boots were shoddy, but that they were too large and wide.
Chapter 5 was one of my favorite chapters--after all, I have this thing for war literature and maritime history, so it was already on a topic that would interest me, but there were other reasons I really liked it: it was smart and informative and like the video about cannons I describe at the end of this post, taught me stuff I hadn't known I didn't know.
In particular, it taught me about military marching. Maybe because of the trauma of being in marching band in high school (someday I might be able to address the pain I still experience when I think about how horrible that was), I always thought that all that regimented, precise marching soldiers had to do was just a form of torture, a way to fill hours and make men so bored and unhappy and tired and frustrated they'll be ready to kill just about anything, given the opportunity.
But no! I mean, that's ONE reason soldiers march, but it turns out there's another:
Martial movement was highly specialized and ritualized. Generals and superior officers had to know the exact pace of their men for tactical reasons. By knowing how many miles or kilometers a troop could cover in an hour or a day, they could calculate how much time it would take to deploy battalions or bring in reinforcements.In order to achieve this end, recruits were drilled until they could move with mechanical precision. Soldiers never "walked" in formation: they marched. Both pace and cadence were crucial.
I also learned that it was only in the 20th century that western military powers regularly supplied soldiers with socks, and that the miseries of the Crimean war were exacerbated by the lack of decent footwear--both socks and boots--among British and French troops. Tell me if this general scenario, if not the details, sounds at all familiar:
Unscrupulous military contractors had supplied shoddy goods to the French and British armies. The shoemaker James Devlin railed against these abuses of power and equated the plight of the underpaid shoemaker with that of the soldier: both were forced to suffer physical and economic misery on account of military footwear. Writing after the deadly winter of 1855, Devlin singled out firms such as Messrs Almond of St. Martin's Lane in London, experts in leather equipment, who had been awarded a contract for footwear they had no experience in making, or corrupt army inspectors, who overlooked manufacturing defects in order to send some boots to the Crimea rather than none.
And then there was this, which I'd also never thought about, but which is completely obvious now that I consider it:
Much of the male (and also sometimes female) wardrobe has been inspired by military styles. Cravats, lapels, pocket flaps, khaki pants, camouflage gear, even the simple T-shirt, worn as an undershirt by American troops in the Second World War, have all crossed over from military to civilian dress.
I will have more to say about this book--it's truly, truly remarkable, but I could never write about the whole thing at one go, so I'm happy to provide this introduction here. And I hope someone else will rush out and buy a copy as well. I originally got it from the library, but about half way through I decided I had to own my own copy. Even now that I've finished reading it, I keep picking it up to flip through and look at the photographs, and the layout of the pages--it's a beautiful, beautiful book.
Posted by Holly at 2:01 PM | Comments (2)
July 18, 2007
Mustard Yellow
Last time I posted a picture of shoes, I wondered why I don't buy more colorful shoes. And then, the other day, I was shopping and I found some mustard yellow shoes marked down from $80 to $10.
I thought, huh. Mustard yellow.
It used to be one of my least favorite colors in the world. I didn't like yellow or orange or earth tones in general. But then, about ten years ago, I decided it was stupid not to like a color, because it deprived me of pleasure. So I set about cultivating an appreciation for earth tones. And now I like orange just fine.
Mustard yellow I'm still not all that crazy about...but the shoes were really cool, and they were only ten bucks, so I got them. I'm wearing them even as I type, and they look like this:
It's really hard to photograph your feet at any angle except straight down, by the way. I wanted to show off the nice wedge heels, but it was hard.
Posted by Holly at 1:58 PM | Comments (4)
June 12, 2007
Something Else I Found in My Closet
A few months ago, as I was browsing the shoe department of some corporate department in my corporate mall, I came across several pair of high-heeled pumps with open work through the body of the shoe. "Those are pretty," I thought. "I would like to own shoes like that."
Then I thought, "Wait a minute. I used to own shoes like that."
And then I thought, "Actually, I am pretty sure I still own shoes like that."
So I went home and checked my closet and sure enough, up on the top shelf, housed in the box they came in, was a pair of blue open-worked high-heeled pumps that I was entirely smitten with when I first bought them--after all, just look at their graceful proportions! Just look at that cool color!
I know that the most common colors for shoes are black and some shade of brown, largely because those are the most practical colors. (I wonder if they're also the easiest to achieve? If black cattle are used to make black shoes, or if leather is always dyed and treated, no matter what the hide of the animal who gave up its skin looked like when the animal was alive?) But given how much I enjoy colorful shoes, like this pretty red pair or this unusual green pair, I wonder why I don't buy them more often.
Or, why, after I buy them, I so often let them sit in my closet. I didn't wear this pair for about a decade, because A) they were fairly out of style and B) they're a somewhat unusual shade, and I haven't always had clothes that matched them in both shade and style; or C) even when I've had dress-up clothes that looked right with them, for much of the past 15 years I've lived places where I have little opportunity to wear rather delicate shoes like this, needing instead sturdy boots most of the time.
But I was so happy to rediscover them, discover that they still fit, discover that they were still flattering, discover that shoes just like this perfectly serviceable pair I already owned were appearing in stores, that I resolved to find an outfit they looked good with and wear them right away.
And I did. I've worn them to a couple of functions lately, most recently to the wedding of a student whose thesis I'd supervised. It was both a lovely wedding and a really fun party (which made me think, just as the wedding in Belgium had, about how joyless and utilitarian Mormon receptions usually are, but that's a topic for another post). The bride was beautiful; the setting was lovely; the food was good; the alcohol was plentiful and free; and while the DJ was fairly lousy, people (including me) danced anyway.
It was such a fun party, in fact, that people found it hard to leave, and stuck around even after the bar closed and the DJ packed up. The weather had not been ideal--it had sprinkled during the ceremony, which was in the morning--but by late afternoon it was simply a cool, slightly overcast, pleasant day. A group of people were enjoying the garden while waiting for the bride to finish changing out of her dress so we could say good-bye, chatting about nothing in particular. As there had been an entire group of women who'd had to shed their shoes when the dancing started, to avoid injury either to ankles or the shoes themselves, the topic moved soon enough to tired feet and the footwear that causes them. Compliments on shoes were exchanged. When someone praised mine, I said, "Thanks. I dragged them out of hibernation in my closet not too long ago. They're really old."
"How old?" one of my students asked. He sounded skeptical, though I couldn't imagine why he wouldn't believe me.
"Older than you," I said.
"Really?" he asked. Again, there was a skepticism I didn't understand. "When did you get them?"
"1984," I said.
He laughed. "Yeah, they really are older than me."
And that's what I was left with: the fact that even though many of my students are adults who are old enough to buy alcohol, I still have shoes older than they are.
Posted by Holly at 12:40 PM | Comments (4)
December 19, 2006
Baby Needed a New Pair of Shoes
As I mentioned yesterday, I wore a holiday get-up of green and red for my last day of teaching, and as I planned this outfit, it occurred to me that red tights in the same shade as my skirt might have been better than either the black or cream tights I had to wear. So I went tight-shopping.
And I found diddly. No red tights were to be had in this entire town, not at department stores, not at Target, not even at shoe stores.
However, at one shoe store, I found these:
And as I had a birthday coming up (that's right--I didn't make a big deal about it this year, but my birthday came and went over the weekend), and as baby needed a new pair of shoes, and as they were on sale and fit perfectly, and as I had two coupons I could use to reduce the cost of the shoes so that they were practically free, I had to buy them.
OK, I didn't real need the shoes. And OK, they weren't practically free. But they look really great and I wore them to a party on my birthday and I plan to wear them again soon, so I still think I did the right thing in buying them, and I didn't mind at all about the tights.
Posted by Holly at 10:24 AM | Comments (2)
September 19, 2006
They'd Be Boring If They Were Black, But the Thing Is, They're Green
I bought these shoes on sale years ago--like, ten--and left them in my closet to age. They were too mannish to suit my taste at that point--I know, I know, if I didn't really like them, why did I buy them? Well, I bought them because they were a super-duper bargain and because they are well made dark green Italian menswear Oxfords, and I knew, I just knew, some day they'd make me really, really happy. Sure enough, about two years ago, I pulled them off a top shelf, realized how awesome they are, and started wearing them with skirts. They are comfortable and a very pretty dark green--did I mention that they're green?
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (8)
September 14, 2006
New to My Collection
As I wrote Monday, I am really loving my camera. I wanted to come up with some worthy subjects to experiment on, and could think of nothing better than my shoes. This particular pair is among my recent acquisitions. I bought them this summer and unfortunately have not had an opportunity to wear them. I love them: they make my ankles look fabulous and I also like how the insole is pale blue, so that the shoe itself is a beautiful thing even when it's not on my foot.
Posted by Holly at 7:54 AM | Comments (5)
August 31, 2005
Existential Dread
Yesterday was the first day of classes. I decided a while ago that I wouldn't write much about my job, mostly because I like it well enough to want to keep it. But I figure there a few safe job-related topics, and I'll hit some of those.
For instance, here were some good things about the day:
1. I finally got to wear these fabulous new red d'Orsay pumps
I bought five or six months ago and have never had an occasion to wear. When you get really great new shoes, you can't wear them just anywhere the first time.... But now these shoes have been introduced to society and can go anywhere they want.
2. The M&Ms that have been sitting in my desk since April were still fresh.
3. Someone very kind left a box of lavender jasmine tea and someone else left a bag of goodies in my mailbox.
4. A student rushed into my office with an mp3 and said, "I've been waiting all summer to play you this song about falling in love in a concentration camp. The first time I heard it, I instantly thought of you." I'm not entirely sure I was flattered by that.... I mean, I did talk about love a lot, especially the traumatic kind, in the classes he took with me, mostly because he wrote about it a lot.... In any event, he showed me these features on my computer I didn't even know about and played me this cool song.
Here were some bad things about the day:
1. Tom and I don't teach on the same day--he teaches MWF, I teach Tu-Th--so chances are I will hardly ever see him this semester.
2. The crackers that have been sitting in my desk since April were anything but fresh.
3. I was plagued all day by existential dread.
I mentioned this last item to a couple of colleagues and they said, "Oh, it's Hurricane Katrina." But it's not Hurricane Katrina. The devastation she wrought in the Gulf fills me with horror and compassion, and as for what the remnants of her are doing here, well, I'm not that afraid of some heavy rain.
I've felt this way for a while, actually. Something beyond my consciousness is wrong, and since I don't know what it is, I don't how to fix it. I have the vague sense that something is menacing me, and I don't much like it. I tried to explain this last Friday to SBJ. I said, "I just have that feeling of alarmed anticipation, that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, that anxious certainty that something bad will happen, but I don't know what and I don't know when."
He said what he always says when you're telling him something that doesn't really make sense to him: "Huh. Hmm. Huh."
I began to fear this is a sensation other people don't have, so I asked, "Have you ever had that feeling?"
He said, "Probably, but I don't really feel like trying to remember a time in my life when I did." Which I guess I could understand; he was in a good mood, so why search your memory for trauma and pain?
But yesterday, when we were talking about our first day back, he mentioned that he's teaching a class on existentialism, and I said, "I'm suffering from existential dread right now," and he perked right up and was all over that. "I don't know what to do about it," I added.
He was as animated as a five-year-old talking about a birthday party. He said, "That's ‘cause there's nothing you can do about it. That's what makes it existential dread: it's generalized; it has no object. If it had an object, it'd be something else: fear, for instance."
"Well, it's making my stomach all tense," I said, punching myself in the gut to show how constricted it was.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You know," I said, "existential dread is just another name for what I was trying to tell you about last week when I saying I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, that something bad is definitely going to happen."
And he did that thing again: "Huh. Hmm. Huh."
I don't normally get jittery at the beginning of the term--I've been doing this a long time--so I suspect it's something besides new-semester nervousness. I don't know what's wrong. Hopefully nothing--I managed to relax after I got home and had dinner and sat down to blog (which is all I really want to do these days). But if it is really something, believe me, you'll hear all about it.
Posted by Holly at 6:04 AM | Comments (1)