Fantasy, fetish and the red shoe

Hilary Davidson explores the colourful history of footwear in fairy tales and folklore

The most magical fictional shoes are those that lift their wearers highest above the earth:

flying, dancing, running or transported to divine realms. As well as being physical, the

elevation can be social or spiritual — above the quotidian. Shoes in fairy tales punish and reward,

elevate and entrap, speed and hinder. They are motifs for childhood innocence and protection — yet

certain footwear also has potent erotic connotations. None more so than when the shoes are red.

Hans Christian Andersen makes his first pair of “red shoes” out of a girl’s feet, rubbed raw by

wooden shoes that are too fine for her peasant origins. For the 19th-century Danish author, clogs,

pattens and other such shoes are poor, cheap, always unmagical footwear, signifying gross rustics

who never rise beyond their earthbound positions.

Andersen’s The Red Shoes has influenced cultural considerations of such footwear ever since. Poor but pretty Karen is punished for her vanity, for her attempts to rise above her station and for “normal sensuality”, with a pair of possessed red shoes, cursed by an old soldier, which dance her mercilessly day and night. The only cure is to cut off Karen’s feet, and the shoes then dance her footstumps away, removing her “sin” at the same time as her freedom of movement. Echoes of frenzy and demonic possession merge here with ideas about controlling women’s pleasure in their own physicality. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 cinematic translation of Andersen’s tale reinforces these resonances. The ballerina Victoria’s red ballet shoes represent her impossible choice between love and art — embodying both her love for a man who wants to remove her from a balletic career, and the extreme but elevating rewards of that career — a conflict that destroys her. Blood-sacrifice also creates a literally red shoe: in some Cinderella tales the stepsisters cut off their own toes or heels to fit the tiny shoe. Suffering the pain of mutilation is, again, the price for pleasures received or anticipated. Charmed red shoes can also tap into themes of innocence and altruistic sacrifice. Andersen’s The Snow Queen sees a little girl, Gerda, giving up a similar pair — “her favourite thing in the world” — in order to rescue her male friend. A recent critic analyses the offering of shoes as a symbol of Gerda’s entry to mature emotional development, contrasting with Karen’s selfish attachment to her vanity in The Red Shoes. Both girls are pubescent, but at different stages of the awakening from innocence. Their red shoes have subtly dissimilar connotations in these tales, which is important for Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939), the most resonant pair of modern magical fairytale shoes.

Dorothy is about 12 when she takes the slippers from the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, an exemplar of femininity gone “wrong” in her unalloyed destructiveness, and, on Dorothy’s maidenly self, the powerful objects become a force for good. The trope retains contemporary power, with red shoes acting as an enchanted defence or as a symbol of release from tribulation. Director Guillermo del Toro, who believes the “imagination and hope” of tales “kept [him] alive through the roughest times” growing up in Franco’s Spain, gave his heroine Ofelia red ankle-boots in the dark cinematic fairytale Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). He returned to the motif as a tiny grace note in the sci-fi spectacular Pacific Rim (2013), where, for a female robot-pilot, they represent the loss of her family to the monsters she fights, and also the love of the substitute father who saved her as a child.

Since the 19th century, red shoes’ mythic associations with sexuality, status and independent action have arguably become as positive for women as they were previously negative. The Grimm brothers’ show hints of the changes by having a pert servant called Clever Gretel get the better of her masters — a saucy audacity represented by the red rosettes she puts on her shoes. In 2006, the lipstick-red heels on the striking poster for the film The Devil Wears Prada embody the ruthless, yet admired fashion-magazine editor to which the title refers. Today, it seems, red high heels as magical, erotic and desirable commodities are the apotheosis of active, full-throttle femininity, and the touchstone for ambiguous social reactions to confident women, whether femmes fatales or CEOs.

Many thanks to: Hilary Davidson 

This is an edited extract from ‘Magical Objects’ by Hilary Davidson, which appears in ‘Shoes: Pleasure and Pain’, published by the V&A. ‘Shoes: Pleasure and Pain’, supported by Clarks and Agent Provocateur, opens on June 13, vam.ac.uk