'It's kind of where the shoe gets you to I suppose': Materializing Identity with Footwear

Following the fourth international 'on the Image' conference in Chicago last year I developed my paper on the relationship between popular culture images and embodied experiences of fashion into an academic journal article in Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, published by Intellect. The article uses Clarks Originals shoes and data gathered from a small group of Sheffield-based male wearers to understand how identity is embodied though fashion. It has been published as the lead article of the current special issue on fashion and materiality edited by Tom Fisher and Sophie Woodward:

[Sherlock's] article effectively manages to combine an understanding of the meanings and associations of the shoes with the material possibilities of the fashionable object. Through the object, wearers are fashioning an identity, which is both anchored in a particular fashion moment and period, yet simultaneously highlights the endurance of a style over time.The meanings of a fashion object are therefore in part afforded by the materiality of, in Sherlock's example, the shoe. Her analysis provides an important corrective to semiotic accounts which do not pay attention to the materiality of the fashionable object. (Fisher and Woodward, 2014: 14)

Article Abstract:

Through their narrative incorporation in fairytales, song lyrics, in movies and on television shoes have become a ‘loaded device’ (Pine, 2006: 353) recycled as metonymy for the wearer or as metaphor for experience. Due to such extensive representation this article argues that they have become, in a sense, invisible. In existing academic literature we have tended to see the message rather than the shoe and we become blind to what Miller describes as the ‘humility’ of the shoe as a ‘thing’ (Miller 2005: 5). This neglect of the materiality of the shoe itself obscures the highly nuanced and subjective experiences of the wearer. As consumers/wearers, we might fully understand – even aspire to – the cultural connotations of a particular pair of shoes, yet this does not mean we will feel socially comfortable wearing them. Using empirical data gathered from wearers of the culturally significant Clarks Originals brand, this article reveals the co-constitutive relationship between the social identity of the wearer and that of the shoe. By focusing on the materiality of objects, bodies and environments we can overcome subject-object dualisms and really ‘see’ shoes in terms of the role they and their meanings play in a process of identification, transformation and cultural embodiment.