All Kinds of Beauty, Fashion & Life.: Killer Heels!

I had the opportunity to go to the Brooklyn Museum as part of my tour. Brooklyn Museum is currently playing host to the Killer Heels exhibition which I was excited to see, and being with only one other person allowed me to take my time and fully engage with the exhibition. As a fashion student and all round shoe lover, I was hoping to see the more extreme versions of footwear as art. I was expecting to see only the highest of heels and also that it would be a relatively small exhibition, which I was wrong about on both counts.

This exhibition was quite large and consisted of a historical timeline of high heeled shoes including the differences in geography as well as segments that explored the blurred lines between high heels and architecture, high heels and art as well as high heeled shoes role within sexuality and fetishism. Many of the shoes I had seen images of before, such as the Celine furry heels as well as the Miu Miu tea cup heels among others, however, seeing them really brought it into perspective as only seeing the physical object and its details can do. Seeing all these amazing shoes in person was really exciting and I felt in awe of some of the design talent that had gone into these shoes, blurring the lines of the functional and art. The historical pieces were interesting as some had a completely different take on the meaning of high heels and also they had minimal technology to create their high heels. However, some of the shoes were more perverse such as the heels that were a horses lower leg and hoof or shoes for bound feet which unsettled me as they are so cruel, yet they're only shoes. Clips from movies or specially created short films added to the experience.

Seeing this exhibition was really interesting for me as a fashion student as it showed and taught me things I didn't expect, like that footwear can really be art, showing that often creative disciplines collaborate or borrow from eachother and that there is such thing as a real pair of glass slippers a la Cinderella.