In Praise of the Ballet Boot (and Other Kinky Forms of Footwear)

 Leather lace-up knee-length ballet boots 

The so-called ballet boot is a style of footwear given us by the pornographic imagination, that ingenuously integrates the box toe of the ballerina's pointe shoe with an ultra high heel, forcing the foot of the wearer to assume a near vertical position and miraculously transcend the ugly flatness of nature. Obviously, they're not designed as casual wear or for comfort; novices can experience painful lower leg cramps, for example. But for those who admire the art of shoe making, they're a perfect combination of culture, cruelty and contemporary calceology.      

Usually, the height of the heel is a minimum of seven inches; long enough to ensure that the foot is fully extended, but not so long as to prevent standing and tottering about. Knee-high and thigh-high versions will often incorporate zips, buckles, and padlocks as well as elaborate lacing; these things - in addition to the material that the boots are made of - being of crucial import to the devotee (the devil being in the detail, as every fetishist knows).   

Apart from the pointe shoe - which was originally conceived in response to the desire for dancers to appear ethereal, like the much loved Marie Taglioni, credited with being the first ballerina to genuinely dance en pointe in 1832 - another precursor of the ballet boot was the Viennese fetish boot (c. 1900), which came with an eleven inch spiked heel that made standing (let along walking) nigh impossible, but came in handy for anal penetration of the submissive male subject.     

Finally, mention must be made of Alexander McQueen's iconic Armadillo boot from the S/S 2010 collection entitled Plato's Atlantis - one of his most astonishing creations for the catwalk. Designed like the ballet boot with high heel and box toe, this outrageously beautiful ankle boot, hand-carved from wood and covered in snakeskin or iridescent paillettes, not only extends the foot and elongates the leg, but seems to organically fuse with the wearers flesh, transforming her into some kind of alien being.
     

Although somewhat challenging to wear - not only because of their height and shape, but also their weight - a bulge designed above the toes enables the boot to be lifted relatively more easily when walking; not that many women will ever be fortunate enough to experience wearing them, as only twenty-one pairs were ever made.

In 2015, Lady Gaga snapped up the three pairs shown above, auctioned by Christie's New York, for $295,000.

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part I) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

Lady Gaga arrives for the 2013 Glamour Women of the Year Awards in NYC

Photo: Timothy Clary AFP / Getty Images.

In a recent article by Luke Lewis on pretentiousness, Lady Gaga may conceivably be disappointed only to come in at No. 16, but she is in entertainingly ostentatious company nonetheless.

Among a showcase of superlative conceits, the writer's implied lesson on the moral merits of humility features an exegesis on the comedic indebtedness of the custard pie to the English Harlequinade, a vaingloriously metaphysical advert for a replica All Blacks shirt (This is not a jersey. This is a portal through which men pass ...) and a photograph of Sting solemnly fingering a lute as his widely pitied wife Trudy assumes a preposterous yoga pose. 

While many would readily draw the line at the notorious earnestness of The Police's former frontman, such a rush to judgement may unwittingly serve to highlight the begged question: who dares to distinguish the genuinely creative individuals from the frauds?

Step forward former poet laureate Andrew Motion, a man who seems more than happy to act in such a capacity. But whenever I think of his dissing the sequin-strewing Jeremy Reed as an effete little pseud - and without holding any specific brief for the latter's literary credentials - I suffer a nasty bout of Motion sickness.

Reed doesn't need Motion's stamp of approval. And besides, there's no fate more deleterious to an author than to be courted, feted, and finally authorised - to become, as in Prufrock's lepidopterist nightmare, 'formulated, sprawling on a pin / pinned and wriggling on a wall'.

 

Likewise, however delicious the passing irony might be of Lewis taking seriously enough those whom he accuses of taking themselves too seriously to spend his time writing about them, the premise of his piece will surely drive a splinter of dread into acolytes of the imagination everywhere.   

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog; parts II and III will follow shortly. 

Queens of the Wild Frontier

Lady Gaga             Princess Julia             Countess Alex Zapak

Female devotees of art-pop seem to have a fascination with aristocratic society and often assign themselves titles, constituting a false order of privilege, or what Adam Ant memorably described as a new royal family / a wild nobility.

But it might be asked if this ironic act of self-entitlement doesn't also betray a certain contempt for class.

For what we observe here is not simply nostalgia or a reactionary desire to return to a world in which everyone had a place and was expected to know their place, but an anarchic attempt to subvert all systems of hierarchy and caste; to construct a utopia in which breeding counts for nothing, miscegenation is celebrated, and everyone - whatever their origin - is allowed to sprinkle stardust in their hair.