shoes

What can the new fashion for flat shoes tell us about the cultural need to control women? [Bound Feet Blues]

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The Guardian has this amusing piece commenting on the new fashion for flat shoes for women.

“Fashion trends generated by the fashion industry exist to make life complicated…. Now that the fashion industry has realised that women are fed up with being told they need to wear five-inch heels to look stylish, they’ve proffered flat shoes, but complicated ones.”

For me, there’s also something about fashion that is meant to make those in the latest fashion feel special – AND to make those who don’t have the latest outfits and accessories feel small, ugly and humiliated.  It’s a power thing – a way to control women to fit in with the self-styled “elite” arbiters of what is fashionable. More than that, this mindset also extends to body image – by making us all want to fit in to an ideal skeletal body shape so that those who don’t end up  feeling shame and self-loathing. It’s a way of controlling women and our bodies.

In researching the history of bound feet for my story performance Bound Feet Blues, I’ve been reflecting on fashion and its insidious destructive power.  The elite in ancient China set the trend for bound feet and as it became more Continue reading →

Emma Thompson on the agony of high heel shoes at The Golden Globe Award 2014 [Bound Feet Blues]

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Emma Thompson

I’ve been meaning to post this item for awhile. Emma Thompson is fabulous and one of my all time heroines. I loved her appearance at The Golden Globe awards earlier this year – for her irreverence and cheekiness, all the while maintaining her cool elegance and stature.

I love that she appeared barefoot with her stilettoes in her hand – and joked about the red colour of their soles being the blood from her feet, revealing what all of us women can feel in high heels but never dare to say! Painful feet is of course Continue reading →

Solo Performance: Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes (work in progress)

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In Chinese tradition, women with tiny bound feet were desirable as wives and lovers, their delicate feet seen as objects of both status and sexual fetish. In her first full length storytelling piece Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes, Chinese-Malaysian story performer Yang-May Ooi explores themes of female desirability, identity and empowerment in this personal story told through the shoes in her life.

The image of Chinese women with bound feet has haunted me since I was a child. I think of these women who have been crippled for life ever since they were 4 years old, unable to walk, with broken stumps for feet beneath the delicately embroidered silk shoes. Just so they can appear to have little, dainty feet and seem to be elegant and graceful – and therefore desirable and marriageable.

Small Feet

I’ve always had small, delicate feet. My shoe size is 3.5 and it’s a real problem trying to Continue reading →

Fascinating X-ray photo of a woman’s contorted foot in stilletoe heels [Bound Feet Blues]

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It looks almost like torture. The bones in the foot sit in an excruciating 90-degree bend and the nails in the stiletto make it look like some medieval tool of pain. This is a woman in high heels, photographed not with normal visible light, but with high-energy x-ray radiation of the sort doctors use to examine broken bones.

That’s the description in this Guardian article about the photo below, by art photographer Hugh Turvey

Photograph of a woman's foot in a stiletto
I’m excited to find this image and to learn about … Continue reading →