Barefoot shoes — a Fashion return to sincerity?
By: Marilia Jardim
Tags: Footwear, Cultural Theory, Consumerism, Fashion, Philosophy

”Shoespiracy” — a film by Vivo barefoot

Our recent obsession with zero waste, minimalism, and a “return to nature” in our diets and other practices seems to peak in a new obsession of my Instagram feed ads: barefoot shoes and the “shoespiracy” film, which I will briefly examine. Footwear that follows the foot, instead of making the foot follow, the idea is to provide a minimal layer of protection, but allowing the feet to feel the surface, which, in fact, is precisely the slogan of the brand Vivo Barefoot — “designed to feel”. Far from being a simple matter of fashion — although, as usual, fashion does the heavy lifting — this new trend is grounded in ideas of overall health, not to mention the zeitgeist: feet and, more precisely, shoes were the metaphors chosen by Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, to substantiate the difference between modern and postmodern reason [1], an analogy recovered by Robin Van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen in Metamodernism, when presenting the matter of historicity, affect and depth as elements pushing ourselves into a new (metamodern) “structure of feeling.” [2]

“Shoespiracy” is an 8-minute documentary presented by the minimal footwear brand Vivo Barefoot as part of their promotion materials: a hectic edition of cut-ups alternating the voice of shoe and foot health experts with images from our feet, historical videos and fashion imagery, reconstructing the million-year history of the human body, including its recent 40 thousand years or so, when footwear became part of our lives. Throughout its narrations, voiceovers, and fragments of interviews, the video pushes the argument that our feet are a perfect piece of engineering, but the need to “make them fit” into shoes to conform to fashion and beauty standards deforms and suppresses their natural attributes, strength and function, which causes the need for “special support” — such as corrective insoles, or cushioned sports shoes. The solution? Minimal footwear, which provides some degree of protection from temperature and other potentially harming agents, while allowing feet to feel the ground they’re walking on which, in the long term, could recover the strength of the foot and ankles, while improving our overall health. This message is reiterated in the selection of imagery, with the clips of barefoot feet (or, of course, feet wearing the brand’s product) are presented in higher definition and always in the captivating tones of nature — greens, browns and blues — as well as the proximity with natural textures — rocks, vegetation, sand, and water — while the images of fashion shoes appear in black and white or in aged, faded quality — past versus now, the future? If not, the nature vs culture binary is marked, even if reversed: Nature ceases to be “the enemy of man”, as is uttered in Modern and Postmodern discourses, to return as the place where we came from and where we should return to. By going back to our “original state”, that is barefoot, we can restore the perfection of our beings and heal ourselves from the diseases and chronic pain plaguing our societies.

Vincent Van Gogh “A pair of boots” (1887) and Andy Warhol “Diamond Dust Shoes” (1988): one century of footwear in the Arts…

When I first saw the Shoespiracy film, I was appalled by the more-or-less accurate speculation Timotheus Vermeulen makes of what “metamodern footwear” would look like. He recovers Jameson’s comparison of Van Gogh’s painting A pair of boots (1887) and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1988) (above) to illustrate two forms of affect, “between sensation and euphoria”[3], which are correspondent to Modern and Postmodern forms of affect respectively:

“…Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots, painted in thick, ‘hallucinatory’ colours and with ‘raw materials’… intimates a lived context outside the painting… whereas Warhol’s nondescript monochrome photo print betrays neither authorial voice nor a definitive or at least traceable reality behind the screen… Van Gogh’s painting pulls the viewer into the world it depicts… Warhol’s print, by contrast, pushes us back…” [4]

Following Jameson’s claim, which is recovered by the metamodern trio, while Van Gogh’s boots correspond to the reality of the peasant who would wear those boots — torn and with thin soles no longer suitable to keep the environment out, the encounter with nature is inevitable and dysphoric, a result of the precarious situation of the boots’ owner. Warhol’s shoes, on the one other hand, are not in relation to the ground they walk on, or with their function as footwear:

“…it no longer matters what the ground is made of…: Warhol does not feel it all that much, he is not himself burdened by it.” [5]

If Van Gogh is undeniably modern while Warhol is perhaps the precursor of Postmodernism in Art, what would a Metamodern shoe look like? “…one which neither allows contact with an ultimate ground nor negates it, but instead performs it.” [6] How not to see the barefoot shoe as exactly this: footwear that, at the same time, neither allows for the contact with the ground (since it is covering the feet) nor denies it (since the minimal covering sustains an “awareness of surface”)?

While Modern and Postmodern appear as a hard binary, not only because Postmodernity is often presented as what comes “after” Modernity, in theory and society, but because it constructs itself as an almost “anti-Modern” manner of being or, to recover Jameson, “structure of feeling”. But Metamodern is something else. The prefix meta stands for “beyond and with” at the same time [7]: the core argument presented in Metamodernism being that the multiple arts of our time — literature, painting, photography, and TV — are drawing from an emerging “structure of feeling” which is neither Modern, nor Postmodern, but reshuffles elements from both to create something else. If we put this in the semiotic square, it would be a neutral term [8]: neither-Modern, nor-Postmodern, a term that, literally, neutralises the contrariety of the base category by denying both terms simultaneously.

Does the same apply to Fashion? Although the field of Literary Critique (which produced the masterpiece Metamodernism I’ve been referencing so far), as well as Communication, insist on leaving Fashion out of the conversation, as if it was “something else”, disconnected from the rest, I’ve been insisting lot, in my own research [9] and in my pedagogic practice (as a Fashion Theory tutor…), on the matter of Fashion as this “force” which affects everything, from Politics to Dress [10], as well as the idea that Fashion is nothing more than a “presentification”, through clothes and manners, of a set of ideas and “obsessions” of an era — an idea that started to be presented in the 19th century, by Charles Baudelaire [11]. In that sense, Vivo’s slogan “made to feel” communicates a broader discourse, far from concerning only the relationship between our soles and the world we walk on. After centuries of (Modern) contempt with Nature and decades of (Postmodern) denial, our time wishes a return to emotion and sincerity, breaking the wall of distancing and irony characteristic of Postmodernity. As a prevalent value in our times today, not only it is possible to see how the shoes stand for a set of obsessions — with the environment, Nature, health, and so on — but that those values find their way towards manifestation through the making and wearing of those shoes.

The overall obsession with the environmental crisis, the welfare of animals, the healing of Earth, as well as with the (consequent?) improvement of our health stems from one, single obsession, which will manifest everywhere: from the foods we eat to the kind of sports we play, to the kind of spirituality (or not) we seek for and, why not, the shoes we wear! The “return to feeling” Vivo Barefoot champions is essentially the same we’ve been seeing in the Arts and in popular culture for a while, which neither embraces nor denies the structures of feeling from the 19th and 20th centuries. As for the incorporation of those values into our manners of dressing, Baudelaire beautifully puts it: if we saw a parade of previous Fashions in front of us, while someone narrated the core philosophical thinking of each epoch, nothing in the pairing of ideas and costume, or in the transitions from one era to the next would surprise or shock us [12]. For me, Baudelaire is talking about the rhythmic transit of values that governs everything: Fashion is one big force that makes everything move and somehow fit together. The fusion of Metamodernism as a philosophy with the footwear manifestation of it is, perhaps, one more confirmation of Baudelaire’s timeless genius…

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Notes

[1] Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso.

[2] Van den Akker, R.; Gibbons, A.; Vermeulen, T. (2017). Metamodernism. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 83–86

[3] op. cit. Jameson, F.

[4] Vermeulen, T. “Depth”. Van den Akker, R.; Gibbons, A.; Vermeulen, T. (2017). Metamodernism. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 147–150

[5] idem

[6] op. cit. Van den Akker, R.’ Gibbons, A.; Vermeulen, T.

[7] idem

[8] Greimas, A.J.; Courtés, J. (1997). Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette.

[9] Jardim, M. “The Corset and the Hijab. Absence and presence in the 19th and 20th-century Fashion System” Actes Sémiotiques, 123, 2020. Available at: https://www.unilim.fr/actes-semiotiques/6415

[10] Landowski, E. Présences de l’autre. Paris: PUF.

[11] Baudelaire, C. (1964). The Painter of Modern Life. London: Phaidon. In semiotics, a similar theory is pushed by Landowski in Présences de l’autre (op. cit.); and Oliveira, A. C. “Visualidade processual da aparência” in: Oliveira, A. C.; Castilho, K. (eds). (2008) Corpo e Moda. Por uma compreensão do contemporâneo. São Paulo: Estação das Letras e Cores, pp. 93–104

[12] idem