Thread for Thought

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RFH7C3vkK4]

News about Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at Bush during a press conference this week, has traveled quickly to alternating responses of horror and glee. The NYTimes reported that “Calling someone the “son of a shoe” is one of the worst insults in Iraq,” adding a new spin to what was already an obviously angry, insulting gesture.

This bold action has added yet another symbolic meaning to the humble shoe: that of irate protest, against American troops in Iraq, specifically. “In the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, people calling for an immediate American withdrawal removed their footwear and placed the shoes and sandals at the end of long poles, waving them high in the air. And in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, people threw their shoes at a passing American convoy.” Some Iraqis said these protests were a direct result of the democracy advocated by America. Ah, sweet sloppy irony.

In searching for a picture of a pile of shoes to include with this post, I was reminded that shoes have historically not only embodied fetishistic sexuality, but also bitter oppression. Concentration camps like Auschwitz hoarded heaps of shoes of their Jewish victims. Shoes were also. valuable bartering merchandise in concentration camps.

Shoe pile at Auschwitz

By the way, $10 million has been offered to purchase the original infamous pair of black dress shoes. Consumeristic democracy in action!

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lipRf1xELuk]

I’ve probably watched more silent movies than many of my peers (and possibly my peers’ parents, for that matter), and though I very much enjoyed the concept and spirit of Lagerfeld’s homage to Chanel, something was off. There was the flickering “film,” the hazy Holga-esqe framing, the deliberately choppy frames, ruby-lipped (and sometimes mustachioed) men with wildly rolling eyes… but something was off, and it wasn’t just the too-long hair.

I realized that it was the women themselves that gave it away as a (mini) period piece and not authentic. They are all just so pointy. The standard of beauty for women of the 20s was thin (for the first time since the end of the 18th century), it’s true. But they were athletic, not emaciated. They had small breasts and hips, but their thighs touched, and more readily visible were their rounded faces and sloping jawlines.

Louise Brooks, star of the silent screen. She's petite but not scrawny.

Dorothy Sebastian, Joan Crawford and Anita Page in "Our Dancing Daughters" (1928). Note the rounded faces.

Today’s models, as exemplified by Lagerfeld’s mini movie, are angular, gaunt, severe beauties of a different time. I’m not saying everything else about the short was historically accurate by any means, but I thought it interesting that the very people (specifically women) used to portray a bygone era actually give it away, even ignoring the more technical inaccuracies.

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