Fashion: Exactly why do women love their shoes so much asks a Huddersfield University research project

Jun 18 2009 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

MENTION the word ‘shoes’ in female company and it’s guaranteed that at least one footwear fanatic will take up the theme.

There can be no doubt, we love our shoes.

And it’s this fascination with shoes, displayed by many women, that is now the subject of new research by psychologists at Huddersfield University.

Dr Viv Burr, one of the leaders of the research, says it was a conversation about shoes with colleagues, over lunch, that prompted her to think seriously about taking an academic interest in footwear. The fact that she’s also a self-confessed shoe-aholic gave the subject an extra ‘edge.’

“A female member of staff had just bought a pair of shoes and the women around the table were immediately interested and had comments to make about these shoes, about what clothes they would wear them with, whether they could get away with wearing them and so on. The amount of conversation generated and the intensity of the discussion was a signal to a psychologist or social scientist that there was something meaningful going on,’’ she said.

Her male colleagues were unable to make much of a contribution to the conversation but one of them was Professor Nigel King, director of the university’s Centre for Applied Psychological Research, and he agreed that the subject of women’s footwear would be a fruitful field for investigation.

So far, Viv, Reader in Psychology at the Department of Behavioural Sciences, and Nigel have conducted in-depth interviews with a small sample of women as part of a pilot study.

Preliminary findings will be presented by the colleagues at an international congress this summer in Italy.

Viv and Nigel showed their research subjects pictures of footwear of varying kinds and asked for their reactions. They discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, that one woman’s must-have shoe was another’s least favourite.

“They didn’t necessarily like the same pairs and they attached quite different meanings to them. But they all seemed to refer to two or three overarching issues. One of them was sex and sexuality - whether a pair of shoes was sexy or you would look sexy wearing them. But, again, the shoes they picked out as sexy were quite different. What one woman sees as smart another sees as tarty. You just couldn’t predict,’’ she said.

The research project will aim to explore the complex psychological relationship between women and their footwear.

“Shoes carry a great deal of meaning for some women. For others it is handbags. We are interested in what the person feels their shoes say about them and how they perceive what other people’s shoes say. It’s about what sense of self women construct by what they wear and the assumptions they make about other women,’’ explained Viv.

Although fashion is frequently thought of as frivolous and unimportant, Viv says an interest in personal appearance is far from shallow and superficial.

“Today, more than ever, how we look is extremely important because society has changed. The old ways of working out what kind of person you are dealing with, of knowing whether you can trust someone, have gone.

“At one time people were born and brought up in the same place and everyone knew everyone else. You would have known all about the people you met every day so it wouldn’t matter how they dressed.

“How people present themselves in appearance is enormously important today in seeking clues as to who they are,’’ she added. “And, of course, we use our appearance to signal what sort of person we want to be taken as. For women, footwear is central to this,’’ she said.

Viv presented an open seminar on her research at the university earlier this month and reports: “There were a lot of women in attendance but only three men. None of the men had more than 10 pairs of shoes but some of the women said they had more than 20 pairs.’’

In fact, she suspects that a sizeable number of women have a great deal more than 20 pairs of shoes, boots, sandals etc in the bottom of their wardrobes.

With the vast choice available today women have probably never owned as much footwear as they do now.

“The choice,’’ says Viv, “affords women more opportunities to make fine distinctions in how they dress and what image they are conveying.’’

It’s the perfect excuse for buying yet more shoes. If we needed any excuses, that is!