I’ve never been much for sneakers. I often visit my neighborhood and surrounding area shoe lockers just to yawn at the same design I saw occupying the shelf four years ago, but in a different colour or with some celebrity or athlete’s name on it. I began to see the error in my ways when I picked up Art & Sole, written and designed by Intercity.

Intercity’s “sneakers” are sports shoes originally intended for basketball, skateboarding or just strolling, elevated to their own subculture by the skateboarding and hip-hop style phenomena. This detailed and up-to-date sneaker art history features oodles of Nikes, as well as other famous labels including Vans, New Balance, and Onitsuka Tiger. Lesser-known labels like Madfoot!, JB Classics and The Quiet Life also make an appearance.

The book is divided into halves: Sneakers & Art looks at collaborations and projects, while Art & Sneakers is composed of sneaker art, publications, exhibitions and toys, all sneaker-themed. Among the toys featured were Swiss design collective +41’s mini chocolate kicks crafted to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Air Force 1 and Takara Tomy’s Nike Transformer dolls, oscillating between toy-shoes and toy-toys.

So by this point you can imagine that this book has a few more tricks to offer than your average sneaker stand. It showed me about 200 pages of shoes and shoe art I’d never seen before. Great. But, what the volume does meaningfully through its pages and pages of sculpture and obscure sneakers is bring out the artfulness in the sneakers themselves; even if, like me, you don’t really care very much about how limited your editions are or whether they are made of chocolate, this book will teach you about who makes these sneakers, and why these everyday masterpieces have become so collectible. And I don’t need to have a room full of runners in Plexiglas backlit cases to appreciate that.

For example, in a handy two-paragraph gloss, I learned about a sneaker I don’t think I’ll easily find in the suburbs, FEIYUE (pronounced stop-living-in-a-bedroom community-with-little-commercial-variety), a name as vague and hard to enunciate as an Ikea cabinet’s. These shoes were actually invented in the 1920s in Shanghai, and were favored by martial artists for their “flexibility and comfort.” French collective Seven Dice designs FEIYUEs, limiting them to only two styles, high and low top. Clearly, these shoes are kind of special.

And that’s the effect of this book. Sneakers with seemingly little material difference to the layman’s eye are given two pages of close-ups, and suddenly they hold their own unique place in a wonderful sneaker gallery. No longer are the shoes simply special or noticeable to those who collect or obsess over them, but even the kitten heel connoisseur is given some insight into why some people go so bonkers over sneakers (the people who do go bonkers over sneakers will probably relish this book for its obscure detail and inspiring objects). That seems to be the art of Intercity, exposing the story and creative value behind something we might never have looked at so closely. Apparently mundane, everyday objects become art. It happened to Greek vases. Why not kicks?

Art and Sole by Nathan Gale (Laurence King Publishers, 2008)
review by Stephanie Herold
photography by Ave Smith

I have been clogging around in my graceless size 11s since puberty, when my feet reached their decisive magnitude. These babies are too wide, long, flat, and plain ugly to fit into anything revealing, and so began my early distaste for provocative footwear.

Upon spying Bad Shoes and the Women who Love Them, I was hoping to undercover a juicy attack on the shoes that my feet can’t wear.

Leora Tanenbaum delivers an empathetic treatise on alluring footwear and its effects on the foundations of physical health. Don’t be fooled by the pretty, light-hearted book cover; in her evaluation of poor footwear, Tanenbaum delivers seven chapters of raw footage that does not miss a step.

“Beautiful shoes, ugly feet” attempts to ground the reader by pointing to the beautification-mortification paradox of footwear—essentially the act of wearing high fashion footwear to distract from the ugly foot, which in turn results in even greater disfiguration. Several women testify to their love affairs with shoes in “Love stories, horror stories.” Unfortunately, these affairs are not entirely romantic; these stories of deceit and abuse pose certain reevaluations after love’s gone bad.

Establishing the platform that footwear can be hazardous, Tanenbaum then delves into how. “What you should know from heel to toe” highlights common maladies of the foot. Perhaps save it for after dinner though, as reading about corns may not sit well with your corn on the cob. “Toetox: Cosmetic Surgery of the Foot” follows, as an evaluation of surgical solutions that sheds light upon health risks in extreme foot makeovers. Tanenbuam compiles research and interviews with podiatrists of varying surgical bents from across the United States to try to reveal a true cost-benefit analysis of cosmetic foot surgery.

For those of you who dig theory, a thorough analysis of shoe-love is saved for a little bit later in the book. Through written historical accounts and interviews, Tanenbaum explores the roots of the heeled shoe from antiquity and forward in “The History of High Heels.” For centuries, societies have cross-culturally denounced one another’s poor footwear over practical and ideological differences. What is revealed is a long history of hazardous footwear and ideological hypocrisy. In a chapter on “The Sex Life of Women’s Shoes,” Tanenbaum guides the reader through myriad proposed theories on the sexual symbolism of the foot and shoe. It is a careful navigation of varying biblical, folkloric, psychoanalytical, and sociological theorems regarding shoes. The bulk of the history is foot for thought, but it is undeniable that shoes have historically been and remain sexualized objects, and that sexing our feet is in turn vexing our health.

Bad Shoes does not leave the reader hanging with no one to save your sole. The final chapter entitled “Shoes Wisely,” evaluates footwear designs that best and worst fit the foot ergonomically, including lists of manufacturers with the most foot-friendly reputation.

Leora Tanenbaum has taken on a serious feat in crafting this concise evaluation of footwear, one that is both practical and theoretical in approach. Any woman, and even any man (despite its female-oriented marketing), can benefit from this vault of foot-‘n’-shoe information. The conclusive message is clear: when walking greater distances, be sure to wear styles of footwear that support the shape, size, and arch of your foot. Now, perhaps you have already been told this by a parental figure of sorts, but Bad Shoes outlines all of the cringe-worthy reasons to care, so don’t be so callous about it.

Bad Shoes and the Women who Love Them, by Leora Tanenbaum, Seven Stories Press, 2010
Reviewed by Jennifer Carroll

Our intern-turned-full-time-staffer (I think her official job title is “Head of All That Artsy Stuff”) Alexandra wears some of the coolest things. These transparent jelly shoes make her look like she’s walking on air.

Photography by Deua Medeiros

“Fashion is a social force that functions effectively not only as an economic engine but as a semiotic system that transmits social and political messages by means of nonverbal language rich in signs, symbols and iconography.” - Ayala Raz, The Equalizing Shoe

For most people, shoes are not the first thing that come to mind when thinking about Jewish cultural heritage. However, after taking a look at Jews and Shoes, a compilation of fourteen academic essays on the apparently unique relationship Jewish people have had with shoes, one must rethink the assumption that shoes are of no particular importance.

Given the Jewish people’s legacy as eternal wanderers, it makes sense that footwear may have taken on a deeper meaning for them. However, this book is far more detailed than that. Split into four thematic sections, it covers a variety of cultural instances where shoes play an important role: religion and the Bible, memorials, political ideology and the arts. To my mind, the strongest essay in this book is a fascinating analysis that questions the commodity fetishism of the piles of shoes found at Holocaust memorials. Having never been to a Holocaust memorial myself, I was surprised to learn of their emphasis on displaying the personal items of those interred and killed at the camps to show the magnitude of the numbers of possessions that were methodically sorted into piles by Nazis intending to redistribute them later. The author, Jeffrey Feldman, does an absolutely superb job of relating memorial attendees’ very visceral reactions to these piles upon piles of shoes of all sorts and the sights, smells, and textures that come from all that rotting leather. The questions posed are not only thought provoking in terms of the legacy of the Holocaust, but about how artefacts and museum objects are structured and displayed in order to evoke an emotional response.

An ancient Roman sandal. Essentially the type of shoe referred to in the book as a ‘biblical sandal’.

Unfortunately, not all of the essays are as well done. I found the first section, dealing with religious and biblical references to shoes, to be weak and tedious. In this section more than any other, I was struck by the dullness of the academic writing style and found that these essays in particular suffer from the Cultural Studies vice of overanalyzing commonplace objects trying to extract more meaning than there is. Sometimes a shoe is just a shoe. At times it also felt as if I needed a working knowledge of the Bible in order to really understand the points that a few of these authors were trying to make. Maybe I’m wrong, and that reference to shoes in Exodus is more significant than I think, however, not having sat down with a copy of the Bible before tearing into this I was left feeling a bit drowned in biblical minutiae.

The profession of shoemaker has historically and traditionally be held by Jews.

That said, although it has its weaknesses, I do recommend this book. Even though it only deals with one culture, as a non-Jewish reader I was fascinated by the importance of shoes in human history, and, as one author puts it, “the communicative role of footwear.” Plus, since this is formatted as a collection of essays, you can dive in and out as you please. At the very least the wonderfully rhyming title will surely make you smile.

Jews and Shoes edited by Edna Nahshon (Berg, 2008).
Reviewed by Anisha Seth.