Taking Stock: a Footwear Research Review and Reading List

Review:

Since the mid-nineties, in tandem with fashion theory as an establishing field of study, footwear has slowly but surely risen to academic attention. Throughout this time, shoes (by which we mean all forms of footwear) have become an indispensable tool to understand multiple phenomena from social and cultural identity and processes of identification to the rise of modernity and the evolution of consumer culture.

Like the field of fashion more broadly, shoes have traditionally been considered a feminine pursuit and frequent links with Freud’s psychoanalysis have ensured a dominant association with theories of sexual fetishism and female objectification. Similarly, the notion of shoe ‘codes’ has become a popular means for structuralists and post-structuralists to theorise the semiotics of fashion as a form of visual communication or ‘language’. Indeed, shoes possess a symbolic potency unmatched by any other kind of garment.

With its heritage in cultural studies, costume and art history, it is no surprise, therefore, that fashion theory has often understood shoes either in terms of their representations or as a form of representation, separated from the living moving bodies that wear and experience them. A lack of empirical research to balance these accounts with the lived realities of shoes (and their representations) for all bodies continues to reinforce dominant, often oppressive ideologies relating to fashion and identity.

More recently, however, a ‘material turn’ has started to see the exploration of embodied experiences, reframing shoes as affective objects that help us establish a sense of self and mediate our engagement with the world in nuanced and diverse ways.

Undoubtedly, as our understanding of ourselves, the world and our places within it evolves, shoes prove themselves time and again to be an invaluable and inexhaustible field of study lending insight to an extraordinary range of topics and perspectives.

And we’re only just getting started!

To date, the evolution of shoes as a legitimate and important field of enquiry has been hampered by their associations with the darker sides of fashion; frequently considered the epitome of commodity fetishism, they have become emblematic of the wasteful excesses characteristic of late capitalist consumer cultures.

Emerging studies however are facing this challenge head-on, not only considering how shoes themselves might become more socially, culturally and environmentally sustainable but what lessons we might learn from our past and present relationships with shoes to develop a more ethical and sustainable consumer culture more broadly.

In the interest of expanding and advancing the field of footwear studies, the Footwear Research Network’s contributors have put their heads together to produce a list of recommended past and present academic texts upon which to build future contributions.

The Reading List

The footwear research reading list contains a range of sources from single-author and edited volumes to book chapters, academic journal articles, exhibition catalogues and research theses. We have grouped these into drop-down categories to help guide you according to your interests.

Of note are the edited volumes Footnotes on Shoes by Benstock and Ferris, Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers by Riello and McNeil and the exhibition catalogue for the V&A’s 2015 exhibition Shoes: Pleasure and Pain. We recommend each of these as bookshelf staples that provide a treasure-trove of essays by notable footwear scholars across a diverse range of categories and topics.

Finally, while some sources may reference footwear production processes, and we have included a section for the study of design and production in the context of social, cultural or environmental concerns, the list does not comprise sources that will teach you how to make shoes.

PLEASE NOTE: The reading list is an evolving resource so if you notice something missing or you would like to suggest additional categories please email alex@footwearresearchnetwork.org