Shoes in the News

[shoesense]

Because every once in a while I read about shoes that make the news for wildly disparate reasons, I thought I'd inaugurate a thread to keep track of that I envision it as a record of the cultural and social significance of shoes in our culture. (Life may not be all about shoes, but there is a great deal to say about them in the first place!)

In today's news: Camilla's shoes cause a ruckus as they are being flown especially to Kuwait so she could have a match for her outfit. She changes mind at the last minute. Environmentalist groups are outraged at this wasteful use of fossil fuel resources, especially as prince Charles had just gotten an environmental award. Many kilobytes of commentary ensue.

[shoesense]

No, literally. A few boxes of shoes fell off a flatbed pick up and spilled onto Interstate 10, eastbound, on March 16, causing an after-work rush hour slow down just east of Date Palm Drive, according to witnesses and the California Highway Patrol.

Well, they were "only" mostly tennis shoes, so at least drivers didn't have any high-heels or "spikes" to duck on the road. No accidents were reported.

[shoesense]

Close to 100 pairs of shoes representing Iraqis killed since March 2003 were on display Monday in the Library Quad of Sacramento State U as part of an anti-war demonstration to mark the four-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. (3/20/2007)

Not the first time shoes are used as art exhibits to bear silent witnesses of the horrors of war. Just recently, the exhibit Shoes of Memory: Holocaust Ceramic Work By Jenny Stolzenberg generated some media interest (seventy pairs of ceramic shoes replicating shoes found at Auschwitz). And there's also this ongoing work: Holocaust Shoes Project.

[shoesense]

This man only owns seven pairs of shoes, and is proud of it. Oh, and one of those pairs is slippers. My heart is saddened.

[shoesense]

We were all horrified by the recent massacre at Virginia Tech--in fact, horrified doesn't even begin to describe it.
This girl credits her life being spared to... a pair of misplaced shoes, which caused her to be late, and stop and check her email one more time, only to see the (belated) warning that there's a gunman on the loose.

[shoesense]

I haven't updated this in a while, and not for shortage of subjects! Shoes always seem to wriggle their way into the news, somehow--so much so that it's becoming hard to keep up with it.

This news item is somewhat old, but still interesting: a new Doc Martens ad which used Kurt Cobain's image was pulled after Courtney Love and a few others expressed their outrage.

Says E!News:

The print ads, promoting the manufactuer's AirWair line and only approved for use in the United Kingdom, portrayed the Nirvana star sitting in a cloudbank, clad all in white except for a pair of black boots. A tag line in corner reads: "Dr. Martens. Forever." Similar ads featured the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious, the Clash's Joe Strummer, and the Ramones' Joey Ramone. The photos were leaked earlier this month [May 2007, ed. n.] via the music blog thedailyswarm.com.

The artistic vision of the ad (Doc Martens=immortal, just like the musical geniuses of such and suc) evidently clashed with the living relatives of those musicians. What's worse, it appears that Kurt preferred to wear... Converse!

[jitterbugbaby]

Gone are the days when shoes simply offered your feet protection from the elements. A new generation of "super" shoes claims to offer a range of benefits, from correcting your posture to getting rid of cellulite, and even relieving the symptoms of diabetes and arthritis.

Here's a link to the Daily Mail's evaluation of several types of shoes that claim to provide health benefits to their wearers.

Wondering whether MBTs really tone your muscles? Do Earth shoes really have all the healthy-related features they advertise? Fitflops? Crocs? They're all there, along with several other models (and links to buy them all).

[coreyschucky]

MBT really does tone muscles. We've had a ton of customers in one of our stores looking and raving about the MBT shoes. We continually sell them out despite there non-fashion look. Each of the shoes also comes with a DVD on how to maximize the shoes. Very interesting company.

[jitterbugbaby]

Here's a new news story about one of our online shoe shopping Mecca's... Zappos. NPR's Weekend Edition had a feature about the online retailer, and you can listen to it here.

[shoesense]

I'll reproduce this story without comment:

Police were hoping for a good turnout at their 'Kicks for Guns' sneaker exchange, but they weren't expecting a surface-to-air missile launcher.


An Ocoee man showed up and exchanged the 4-foot-long launcher for size-3 Reebok sneakers for his daughter, the Orlando Sentinel reported Friday.


Taking advantage of the exchange's no-questions-asked policy, the man was not identified. He told the Orlando Sentinel that he found the weapon in a shed he tore down last week.


'I didn't know what to do with it, so I brought it here,' he told the newspaper. 'I took it to three dumps to try to get rid of it and they told me to get lost.'


Besides the missile launcher police collected more than 250 guns. They were all exchanged for sneakers or $50 gift certificates.