LONDON: For centuries, women and sometimes men have squeezed their feet into tiny shoes or balanced on towering heels to feel sexy, empowered and to show their wealth and status.
Now their sacrifice is being celebrated in a new exhibition, 'Shoes: Pleasure and Pain', which opens at the V&A museum in London on Saturday.
From a 2,000-year-old pair of Egyptian gold sandals to child-like Chinese slippers for bound feet, to Christian Louboutin's red-soled stilettoes, the 250 exhibits reveal how fashionable shoes have always been more than footwear.
"The exhibition is about the obsession of shoes. It's looking at the power of shoes, how they can tell about status and privilege," curator Helen Persson told AFP.
Luxury shoes have long been the preserve of the rich and idle. Regardless of the cost, high heels, sumptuous fabrics and delicate designs have no place in the field or factory, or indeed in running for a bus.
Where women today have Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo, 19th-century Egyptians had 28.5-centimetre wooden bath clogs and 17th-century Venetian ladies had to balance on their maids to walk in towering "chopine" platforms.
Advances in engineering have made many shoes more comfortable but also enabled designers to make them higher and more outlandish, exemplified by Noritaka Tatehana's gravity-defying heel-less shoes.
"Even though they seem so extreme and not wearable, they were designed to be worn," said Persson of the exhibits, which are taken from the V&A's archives as well as loans from other museums and private collectors.
"It's this intriguing thing -- we accept that shoes are pleasure, but also have a bit of pain. And we seem to have accepted that for 2,000 years."
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