Exhibition Review: Marche et Démarche
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, November 7, 2019 - March 22, 2020
Bernoit Méléard, Hommage à Calder shoe, “O” collection 1999
Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs © MAD Paris / photo: Hughes Dubois
As we enter our second month of lockdown in London, there has been one aspect of my daily dressing that I have neglected more than anything else: shoes. One session of exercise, one trip to the shops — I have lived almost entirely on a rotation between slippers, sneakers, and a certain orthopedic sandal that hails from Germany. As my own relationship with this item of dress shifts, I have been reflecting upon a recent exhibition that emphasized the physical and emotional connections that we form with our footwear.
Open from November 7th, 2019 to March 22nd, 2020, Marche et Démarche at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, presented a global history of shoes and examined the influence they have had in modifying our bodies (by making us taller or changing our posture) and our perception of self. The past decade has seen some excellent exhibitions dedicated to the history of footwear [1], and it is fitting that Paris, a city whose cultural ties to the act of walking have been immortalized by Baudelaire’s flâneur, was the latest setting for an exhibition examining this essential daily object. This tone of self-reflection was encouraged upon arrival at the museum, as visitors were immediately directed to look to their feet, where a whimsical pathway of silver soles adhered to the floor led visitors to the start of the exhibition.
The opening room took a broad look at how social and environmental factors had a greater impact on the differences in how people walked prior to the industrialization of shoe manufacturing in the 19th century. The first case neatly displayed tiny examples of how cultures around the world instill meaning into a child’s first steps, whether it is by pre-empting their paths to adulthood with miniature examples of prevailing fashions, as in Europe, or by embellishing moccasins with protective medicines, as seen in a petite pair of moccasins from North America. Moving on to adult shoes, the influence of class, as well as culture, was also conveyed. A large display case in the center of the room contained a topsy-turvy boardwalk upon which pairs of sturdy peasants’ clogs carved from dense blocks of wood were juxtaposed with elegantly shaped court shoes of damask and fine leather. The former intended to stabilize the wearer whilst trudging over muddy fields or across uneven cobblestones and the latter, with their lightly scuffed soles, barely intended to be walked in at all.
Playful contradictions such as this continued throughout the exhibition. In the next gallery, the central case was dedicated to the seemingly eternal and cross-cultural obsession with adding inches to our height via our footwear. Salvatore Ferragamo’s distinctively avant-garde rainbow platforms surprise many with their creation date of 1938; however, sitting quietly nearby was a Grecian statuette dating to the first century B.C., wearing platforms twice as high. The next question on everyone’s mind — how could such creations be worn — was anticipated by the exhibition designers who cleverly included a mirrored fitting room where visitors could try on replicas of six daring examples. As far as didactic devices go, providing visitors with the chance to walk—or at least to witness others attempting to walk — in replicas proved a simple and entertaining way of engaging people with the subject.
Shoe belonging to Marie-Antoinette, 1792
Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs © MAD Paris / photo: Christophe Dellière
However, a more challenging theme for visitors to relate to was the practice of constraining and binding feet. Most frequently associated with China, the adulation of unnaturally small feet was also common in Europe from the 17th century onwards. While recent scholarship has challenged the misconceptions of the practice in China, such as Dorothy Ko’s brilliant Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, its presence in Europe is rarely scrutinized to the same degree and so it was refreshing to see this redressed. [2] Considered a signifier of feminine virtue and refinement, smaller feet were not merely a result of malnourishment in the West, as often assumed, but were actively and painfully fashioned as evinced here by a French podiatrist’s pamphlet from 1802 that advised tying one’s toes together with cloth. Rows of extremely narrow slippers, including a pair owned by Marie Antoinette measuring just 5 centimeters wide, and examples of Chinese “golden lotus” slippers, were all positioned above outlines marking today’s standard foot sizes so that comparisons could be clearly made. This systematic approach to the display contributed to a balanced exploration of a subject that is often problematically limited to its fetishist elements.
This is not to say that the curators avoided exploration of the erotic potential of footwear. There was an entire wall of tantalizingly curtained objects dedicated to this theme. This was pointedly separated from the foot-binding section by a succession of galleries that focused on traditions of developing footwear for specific activities or occupations such as playing football, soldiering, and dancing en pointe. These cases helped to demonstrate that our emotional association with certain shoes is not necessarily tied to any actual physical experience, but stems from witnessing their performative function on others.
In a similar fashion, we are now mostly removed from the labor of manufacturing shoes and hence prone to romanticize it — a fact that the exhibition did little to dispel by focusing solely on heritage craftsmanship rather than mass-production. A film of Fred Rolland hand finishing a pair of green leather pumps was accompanied by a mixture of framed design sketches and a table-top case displaying specialist tools laid out like a tray of surgical equipment.
This emphasis on artisanship and aesthetics was carried through to the extreme at the close of the exhibition, which was dedicated to contemporary designers and artists abandoning function altogether in favor of highly abstract and highly unwearable shoes. By fluctuating between examples of utility and sensation, the exhibition succeeded in presenting the ever-shifting nature of our relationship with shoes. Thinking back on this final room has me reassessing my own recent retreat into dull, functional footwear; on with the heels!
NOTES
[1] The Brooklyn Museum, Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe (September 10, 2014–March 1, 2015), and The Rise of Sneaker Culture (July 10–October 4, 2015). The Victoria and Albert Museum, Shoes: Pleasure and Pain, (June 13, 2015 to January 31, 2016).
[2] Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, (University of California Press, 2007).
