Foot Notes: Shoes, Symbolism, and Society

Foot Notes draws on the Wolfsonian's collection to trace the first half of the 20th century, when new materials, machinery and marketing reshaped what shoes could do. Ferragamo's 1938 Rainbow wedge sits in the same galleries as a c. 1946 Simplex X-ray shoe sizer, the cabinet that once let shoe shops look at a customer's foot through the leather, alongside department store shoe displays, wartime posters and Beth Levine's 1961 Cinderella shoe. Curator Danielle Charlap arranges the material around merchandising, innovation and propaganda, and a free audio tour adds an athlete, an artist, a designer and the owners of a family shoe repair shop talking about what shoes do to a person.