We had quite a few tiny-toed lasses enter our shoe giveaway, but it is Mamichan who gets to take them home. Congratulations!

For those that want to see the shoes in action, it is never too late to purchase issue ten. Hint hint.

If you are one of many, you might have fallen in love with our “I Eat Style” photoshoot from issue ten. If you are one of few, you might be able to fit into the size 5.5 teal heels modeled by Van Le, above. The shoot’s art director, Stephanie Herold, says she found them at a vintage store right before the shoot in the exact colour and size she was looking for. (”That’s how I think Jesus shows he loves me.” - Stef).

We are giving away these kicks to one lucky WORN reader. All you have to do to win is… have tiny feet. The first reader to reply to this post who wears a size 5.5 gets ‘em. That’s it, really. (Of course, if you wanted to brighten up this Monday morning, you could also tell us the outfit you plan to wear them with, and maybe throw in a knock knock joke or two, but we’ll give them to the first entrant regardless).

Tally ho!

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