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Psychologists, as early as J. C. Flügel (1930), analyzed dress as a means of creating and expressing identity. Despite charges that fashion is a form of bondage, dictating particular looks and encouraging conformity, it can be “one means whereby an always fragmentary self is glued together into a semblance of unified identity” (Wilson 11). Writers from Chaucer to Flaubert and beyond have exploited apparel as a signifier of status and personality. The Wife of Bath’s bold red skirts and hat signal her passionate nature, while Charles Bovary is first attracted to Emma by her shoes.
Our individual attachment to particular garments or accessories, such as shoes, and the pleasure we take in them has been a tantalizing area of investigation, particularly to psychoanalysts. Much has been written about clothing as fetish objects, standing in for an absent wearer or substituting sexually for the body itself. Valerie Steele’s Fetish (1996) offers often disturbing but always engaging examples. But even traditional folktales, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” and Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella,” attest to the power of disembodied footwear.
As objects in their own right, shoes and other fashionable items have figured significantly in art. Anne Hollander has demonstrated in Seeing Through Clothes (1980) that the adorned body has shaped our perceptions of the body itself, arguing that the nude as it has appeared in Western art since the classical period was influenced by how women appeared in the latest fashions of a particular time. Artists themselves, such as photographers Diane Arbus and Man Ray, honed their skills on fashion shoots, while painters from Vincent van Gogh to Andy Warhol have featured shoes as their subjects. Film is a kinetic museum of fashion, as Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997) and countless other studies have shown. Literature, too, documents the changes not only in fashions but in our ideas about the relation of clothing to the body.
Given that, since at least the eighteenth century, fashion has signaled gender difference, it has been a concern of theories regarding the construction of sex and gender.