Shoes

Meaning of Style

By: Elizabeth Semmelhack

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Paperback | 15 April 2019

At a Glance

Paperback
368 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 16.1 x 2.3

Paperback

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We all make choices every day about which shoes to wear, but why do we choose the shoes we do? Organised around four main types — boots, sneakers, high heels and sandals — Shoes: The Meaning of Style explores the history of shoes and how different types of footwear have come to mean different things about the people who wear them.

Along the way Elizabeth Semmelhack reveals the anecdotes and scandals, successes and failures, dislikes and obsessions of the makers, wearers and observers who helped to create the movements and fashions of footwear. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Shoes is a thoroughly surprising history of an everyday item that will appeal not only to followers of fashion, but to those interested in social history and identity.

About the Author

Elizabeth Semmelhack is senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto. She is the author of Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture and Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe.

Industry Reviews

"In Semmelhack's wonderful new book she uses her extraordinary knowledge of shoes to shed light on the cultural and ideological over the more familiar accounts of fashion's ever evolving designs. Through vivid examples and rare illustrations, she invests the four categories of sandal, boot, high heel and sneaker with new meaning. It will become essential reading for students and scholars alike."

--Judith Clark, University of the Arts, London "Journal of Fashion Theory"
"Semmelhack's book takes issues of identity politics firmly in hand, yet she writes like a true art historian. The result is an incredibly edifying, deeply entertaining, manifestly readable look inside everyday objects that most of us are too busy to truly consider. The book is a more than adequate reference guide for those in the industry, a sample of how to properly curate and discuss a museum exhibit, a lovely coffee table book, and a highly readable adventure in general. This is one of those rare books that truly offers something substantive for everyone who might not usually think about picking it up. On its face, such a daily subject may not seem worth getting excited about, but Shoes is not at all prosaic and it's quite difficult to put down after the first few pages."--Megan Volpert "PopMatters"

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