Killer Heels

While I was in New York over the holidays, Deputy Shoe Fairy Sue and I went to the Brooklyn Museum to check out their exhibit Killer Heels.  From the high platform chopines of sixteenth-century Italy to the glamorous stilettos on today’s runways and red carpets, the exhibition looks at the high-heeled shoe’s rich and varied history and its enduring place in our popular imagination.  The exhibit features more than 160 historical and contemporary heels on loan from designers, from the Brooklyn Museum’s own renowned costume collection housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and from the Bata Shoe Museum.

 

The Shoe Fairy visits the Brooklyn Museum!

I liked that the curator Lisa Small chose not to organize the shoes chronologically, but rather thematically.  Over here we have sexy-slash-fetish shoes, everything from Marilyn Monroe’s pumps to those crazy ballerina Louboutins to platform shoes worn by oiran (high class Japanese prostitutes from before the eighteenth century) that requires a servant’s assistance to help them walk.  (One of the videos shown in the exhibition is a very helpful one showing the annual oiran parade, with three women decked out like oiran demonstrating their distinctive walk.  It’s fascinating.  There are more videos in that section, including one that’s essentially a crush film using a toy car instead of an animal and one of a woman in sky high heels walking on a blindfolded man’s naked torso.  It was amusing to hear a mother visiting the exhibit try to explain these to her small children.  Kudos to her.)

My favorite section may have been the one on shoes and science.  It looked at not only how advances in science affected design trends (space everything! nuclear everything!), but how advances in materials did as well.  (Check out the video clip from 1939 discussing fashion in 2000 if you want a chuckle.)

The shape of this 2008 Light Bulb Heel by Chanel on display in the science section mimics the 1935 Russell Wright lantern so well, don’t you think?

Another great section examined the shoe as a metamorphosis, including a pair of black boots with enormous black wings, a pair of boots crafted to look like horse hooves (quite convincing!), and this pair:

See the itty bitty black things in the big circle on the heel?  Those are seeds!  Artist/designer Sputniko! worked with shoe designer Masaya Kushino to create this, called Healing Fukoshima (Nanohana Heels).  With every step, a mechanism in the heel plants flower seeds known to absorb nuclear radiation.  Isn’t it wonderful?  A thing of beauty, planting things of beauty, to make our damaged world a more beautiful place.  (Sure it’s impractical since it takes you a long time to carefully make every step and they are seriously like seven inches tall, but don’t rain on my parade here.) 

Killer Heels shows through February 15, so you still have like five and a half weeks to see it.  It’s worth the trip!  Thanks, Brooklyn Museum, for giving the high heel the exhibit it so richly deserves.