The self and the shoes: fashionable curiosities and identity

This paper is concerned with an aspect of the material culture of fashion, which also happens to be a personal passion. It focuses on shoes, although I am here looking at a very specific category of women shoes: the extreme, ‘impossible-to-wear shoes’. The ‘impossible-to-wear’ is an arbitrary term, which aims to emphasise their unusual design that does not allow us to slot them into an ‘adequate system of classification’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 1). There have been extensive studies on the ways in which clothes and accessories (including shoes) are used to socially represent and empower (or not) women. Furthermore, although the fashion phenomenon of the extreme shoes is not new, it is only in the recent years that they have become more popular both in the high fashion and social scene. This has opened up the opportunity to understand further the postmodern discourse, which tends to simulate and exasperate the values and principles of beauty, power and status. Throughout the paper, I intend to define the ‘impossible-to-wear’ shoes and consider the visual statements, if any, made through them, about contemporary society, women, their identity and their femininity. I will argue that the extreme shoes are the products of the society of the spectacle and as such are very seductive and challenging objects: they are contemporary curiosities, which consent the shift between the ordinary and the extraordinary and therefore allow women to step into a visually playful (but not necessarily empowering) fantasy-world

Ritual, Recycling, and Recontextualisation: Putting the concealed shoe in context

The concealed shoe is, possibly by design, shrouded in mystery. All that is known for certain on this subject is that a large number of shoes, usually old and damaged, were concealed in various, unconventional locations within buildings throughout England, and that this practice was particularly popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other than these few facts, all other information on the subject is speculation. With no contemporaneous written sources on the practice of concealing shoes, this article will utilize the archaeological evidence in order to ascertain the motivations behind the act of concealment. An analysis of two case studies of concealed shoe caches from North Yorkshire, with a particular focus on their locations and conditions, will hopefully prove invaluable in the investigation into this unusual practice, together with an examination of the relevant folk beliefs and superstitions of the period. It will also be questioned where the concealed shoe stands in relation to our everyday classificatory systems. As a marginal, mutable object, the concealed shoe boasts a highly complex biography, calling into question the pertinence of such categories as valuable/rubbish, and particular attention will be given to the shoes’ numerous recontextualizations, from practical footwear, to apotropaic device, to archaeological artefact; transitions which I have dubbed ‘ritual recycling’.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Cowl - v. 69 - n. n/a - Feb 10, 2005 valentine\u27s Day Issue

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 69 - Number N/A - February 10, 2005 Valentine\u27s Day Issue. 8 pages

Revealing the Ritually Concealed: Custodians, Conservators, and the Concealed Shoe

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Material Religion, on 19 April 2018, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2018.1443892. Under embargo until 19 October 2019.Concealed shoes are footwear purposely concealed within domestic buildings. The motivations behind their concealments are unknown to us, but the prominent theory suggests that shoes were employed as apotropaic (evil-averting) devices. The metonymical connection between shoe and wearer is believed to imbue the shoe with the necessary protective power, and one theory suggests that, to possess this power, shoes must bear the unambiguous imprint of their past wearers, hence why the vast majority of them are old, well-worn or damaged. From the point of discovery (often during restructuring work), the concealed shoe’s biography can follow a variety of courses. Some debate, for example, surrounds their removal. Some finders believe it to be “bad luck” to remove concealed shoes and therefore wish to keep them in situ. Others are donated to museums, where still more debate surrounds their treatment: should they be restored by textile conservationists or left in their original state, their damaged conditions being considered central to the interpretation of the custom? This paper aims to trace the complex biographies of several examples of concealed shoes following discovery, considering how they have been variously perceived and treated by their finders and custodians.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Business Startup and Cause Marketing in the Running Apparel Industry

Entrepreneurship has been the backbone of the American economy since the penning of the Declaration of Independence. Small businesses help the United States prosper and help create jobs for the American people. As today’s business world is increasingly changing in a technological and global way, entrepreneurs must consider many environmental conditions in their small business planning. Business start-up is a long process backed by research and market testing that will maximize the opportunity for success. One way many business start-ups have become successful is through cause-related marketing programs that many people support. Additionally, a particular industry that has proven to be successful despite tough economic times is the sports apparel industry, and specifically the running industry. This thesis will seek to tie together entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, and the running footwear and apparel industry. Entrepreneurs looking to get involved in the running industry can be successful in today’s business world if their venture is coupled with great start-up research, a great cause and a corporate social responsibility program

A survey of third grade children's likes and dislikes in a basal reader.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Learning Visual Clothing Style with Heterogeneous Dyadic Co-occurrences

With the rapid proliferation of smart mobile devices, users now take millions of photos every day. These include large numbers of clothing and accessory images. We would like to answer questions like `What outfit goes well with this pair of shoes?' To answer these types of questions, one has to go beyond learning visual similarity and learn a visual notion of compatibility across categories. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework to help answer these types of questions. The main idea of this framework is to learn a feature transformation from images of items into a latent space that expresses compatibility. For the feature transformation, we use a Siamese Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture, where training examples are pairs of items that are either compatible or incompatible. We model compatibility based on co-occurrence in large-scale user behavior data; in particular co-purchase data from Amazon.com. To learn cross-category fit, we introduce a strategic method to sample training data, where pairs of items are heterogeneous dyads, i.e., the two elements of a pair belong to different high-level categories. While this approach is applicable to a wide variety of settings, we focus on the representative problem of learning compatible clothing style. Our results indicate that the proposed framework is capable of learning semantic information about visual style and is able to generate outfits of clothes, with items from different categories, that go well together.Comment: ICCV 201