A Little History Of Red Footwear

A Little History Of Red Footwear :

This previous April, Christian Louboutin filed a claim against couture competitor Yves Saint Laurent, suing that the legendary style house had committed trademark infringement when it factory-made and sold shoes with a ruby-red sole. On Monday, the NY Post described that YSL’s representatives had argued in law court documents that the red sole cannot be considered copyrighted to Louboutin: “Red outsoles are a commonly used ornamental design feature in footwear, dating as far back as the red shoes worn by King Louis XIV in the 1600s and the ruby red shoes that carried Dorothy home in The Wizard of Oz.”

In history speaking, this is factual! Red shoes—if not always red soles—has long been related with issues of power and identity. During the reign of Louis XIV, only aristocratic men had the right to wear shoes with red heels—they were strictly reserved for the court of law. Therefore the color neatly distinguished between the haves and have-nots. Red dye at the time was lavish, made by crushing the dried bodies of an imported Mexican insect called the cochineal, and only royal family and their cohort could pay for it.

The shoes went out of grace with the French Revolution—not a time when one flaunted one’s wealth and status.

After Two centuries, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen contributed significantly to red shoe mythology. In his story “The Red Shoes,” a young peasant teen-ager named Karen is adopted by a woman of the gentry—but Karen fails to appreciate her good fortune, and instead aspires to transcend class boundaries even further. One daytime, she spots a princess. Red morocco shoes peep out from beneath the princess’s clothing. Karen brazenly tricks her adopted mom into buying her a pair of her own then, instead of attending to family obligations, wears the shoes to go out dancing. She discovers that once she starts dancing, she can’t stop, nor can she remove the demonic shoes from her feet.

Andersen’s moralistic fairy tale may not serve as the most appealing ad for red shoes, but it certainly attests to their potency.

When The Wizard of Oz performed in movie theaters in 1939, the joining among the color red and the magic of footwear was strengthened further. MGM’s costume designer, Adrian, who distinguished himself on the studio lot by designing stylish gowns for silver screen starlets like Jean Harlow, experimented with a few different versions of Dorothy’s sequined shoes before he settled on the final design: a simple, round-toed medium-high pump with a similar bow. The ruby slippers, like Judy Garland’s pigtails and her blue gingham smock, were meant to underscore the character’s blamelessness which, given the lingering effects of the Great Unhappiness and the threat of World War II, director George Cukor believed to be crucial to the film’s achievement. Interestingly, Dorothy’s shoes were originally silver—a holdover from L. Frank Baum’s original children’s story—and the switch to “ruby” came relatively late in the screenwriting process. It was assumed that red would look better in Technicolor. Without that one, momentous decision, Louboutin and YSL might be locked in a claim over sparkling silver soles nowadays.

In 1948, The Red Shoes, the magnificent film adaptation of Andersen’s story, debuted. Now set in the competitive world of typical ballet, this version downplayed the economic implications of the original fairy fiction; instead, the story was infused with a healthy dose of gender legislation, at a time when the battle (and the related rise in lady employment) had complicated the country’s understanding of the old-style roles for males and females. Vicky, the flame-haired protagonist played by Moira Shearer, is an wishful dancer, hungry to victory admiration for her talent as a prima ballerina. She achieves her vision with the help of a controlling director, who casts her as the lead in the ballet “The Red Shoes”: a shadow story that more closely resembles Andersen’s original. When Vicky falls in love, she’s forced to decide among her husband and her desire. Ultimately, she selects dance—and fame. Then, slipping on her red toe shoes for her act, she senses an overwhelming urge to dance off the theater’s balcony, where she plummets to her death.

Alike Karen, Vicky is punished for attempting to bypass societal boundaries, and for deeming her wishes more significant than the obligations of her marriage vows. The power of the red shoes lies in their ability to reveal some fundamental truth about the wearer—and deliver a penalty, or prize (as in The Wizard of Oz), accordingly.

But today’s litigation isn’t just about red shoes. Anyone can manufacturing and sell those; each day off season designers from Miuccia Prada to Steve Madden churn out festive red sequin pumps that are a wink at ruby slippers. In the case against Yves Saint Laurent, Louboutin isn’t laying claim to the color red. He’s defending his usage of the red outsoles that are the brand’s mark. Ever since the days when Sex and the City was a hit show on HBO, shoes have attained a cult-like status in this state, and buying costly, high-fashion footwear is now measured a rite of passage for any aspiring style maven. In the ’90s, the most coveted shoes were those designed by Manolo Blahnik, but then Christian Louboutin, France’s secret armament, arrived on the scene. By 2008, when the much anticipated Sex and the City movie premiered, even the franchise that made Manolo well-known had switched its allegiances. Carrie Bradshaw, who had once told a mugger, “Please, sir, you can take my Fendi baguette, you can take my ring and my wristwatch, but don’t take my Manolos Blahniks,” now wore Louboutins.

What makes Louboutin soles so brilliant is that it only takes a smidge of pop-culture consciousness to recognize them, unlike a Blahnik shoe, whose more subtle recognizing marks (quality, shape, whimsical embellishments) need some fluency in footwear to discern. Publics who can’t tell the difference among a Giuseppe Zanotti and a Jeffrey Campbell see the flash of red and know they’re looking at a Louboutin.

In the last period, Louboutin’s red soles have become a sort of visual shorthand that signals a lady’s high economic status and power. They also carry an undercurrent of the risqué, like the glimpse of a red lace bra strap under a conservative blouse. In this way, Louboutin’s shoes have become the material of a modern-day fairy fiction. Just as in Andersen’s story, they symbolize independence and high status. The woman who garbs them is given the opportunity to transcend economic and social limits—except this being labeling, and not grim Danish storytelling, she ends up, not embarrassed, but “empowered” by the shoes. Time and again, pop culture reinforces this narrative. In Jennifer Lopez’s single “Louboutins,” she invokes the red sole as the last thing her cheating mistress will see now that she’s found the courage to leave him (not unlike Nancy Sinatra’s calling upon the strength of her boots to keep her walking). 2009’s silly thriller Obsessed showed Ali Larter’s character—a sexy temp with a pathological infatuation on her married boss—climbing his stairs at the climax of the film with her red soles blinking behind her. And newly, the female leads of two USA dramas, “Covert Affairs” and “Fairly Legal” have been costumed in Louboutins to underscore their status as popular, self-possessed females.

It’s been pointed out that YSL has occasionally factory-made and sold shoes with red soles as far back as the 1970s. And it remains to be seen whether Louboutin can defend his product’s trademark against his rival in court of law. What is clear, though, is that Louboutins are a historically significant new take on our long fascination with ruby slippers