The Clothed Body

Objects
of France and Italy; in Sardinia, for example, where local tradition merges
with deep-seated political, often socialist, tradition.
From Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde to Madonna, from Salvator
Dalì to English boarding school pupils, the list of those who wear a beret
is never ending, in a game of cross-references, citations and models which
exist in our minds without our knowing it. Thus the power of certain
fashion items to transform a classic into a cult is confirmed.
‘Scarperentola’ (from the Italian for ‘shoe’ – ‘scarpa’ – and ‘Cinderella’
– ‘Cenerentola’) was a show in Milan at the beginning of the 1990s dedicated
to shoes, which brought together artists and designers from all over
the world. In it shoes were presented not only as canonical items for the
feet, but also as items of furniture, ornaments, armchairs and so on, in
accordance with the popular tendency (‘postmodern’ or ‘neobaroque’
depending on one’s point of view) to take an object out of its appointed
place and have it fulfil another role. The play on words which inspired the
title of the show underlines the link between shoes and fairytales – that is,
between daily life and social imagery – forged through the universally recognizable
character of Cinderella in her various guises, and, by contrast,
the fact that the shoe is only the seeming ‘Cinderella’ of clothing.
Indeed, compared to the ugly step sisters, represented in a narrow sense
by clothing, shoes, which are commonly defined as ‘accessories’, have
known various forms of resurgence, becoming important objects both in
the search for stylistic novelty and in the public’s attention, at different
times in the history of costume and fashion. Our era seems to be one of
these moments. An indicator of this recent transformation can be found in
the world of shoe advertising, where we can see a change of emphasis from
‘adventure shoes’ and ‘comfortable shoes’ to the possibility of giving the
shoe its own specific ‘language’ which is not directly tied to function.
Luciana Boccardi (1993) says something similar, from the point of view
of the ‘internal’ history of the shoe, stating that shoes began to catalyse the
creativity of designers in the 1990s and to gain an important position on
the commercial market and in the world of fashion. Boccardi concentrates
on women’s evening footwear, or party shoes. Yet she also writes a full
history of this object, in which she maintains that, apart from their
changing aesthetics, shoes have always fulfilled a symbolic role: for
example, in the seventeenth century shoes ‘in the French style’ or ‘in the
Spanish style’ expressed political preferences; dancing shoes in the period
leading up to the First World War epitomized the philosophy of ‘flaunting
not hiding’ typical of fashion in those years; the ‘flower children’ in the
1960s danced barefoot or in Indian sandals, taken from the culture that
had inspired their movement.
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