The white, combat-boot high-heel upper. The plexiglass wedge stolen from a stripper heel. The Barbie & Ken-doll heads.
Really, where to start?
These Jadis boots by Jeffrey Campbell are possibly the ugliest shoes ever made. Ever. But they're also undeniably fascinating. They struck me as the work of a post-Apocalypse cobbler living in a Mad Max world; what s/he would whip up using materials found in a landfill. Or perhaps a garbage dump. Plus it's more than a tad macabre to use severed doll heads, no?
The pile of cheery, disembodied plastic heads reminded me of stylized violent scenes from end-of-the-world movies or a zombie apocalypse flick. Zombies, in particular, play a fascinating role in pop culture. According to Paul A. Cantor, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia and author of The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (2012), zombies represent our growing fear that the institutions we once revered - mainstream medicine, big food & pharma, the church, the government - have failed us. Worse, globalization threatens the very core of what makes us us: our individuality.
He explains that the juggernaut that is globalization is what zombies in pop culture represent:
National borders cannot stop the zombie plague from spreading, and it evidently dissolves all cultural distinctions. The zombies lose their individuality, freedom of will, and everything that makes them human beings. With their herd mentality, they are precisely the kind of mass-men that impersonal institutions seek to produce, and in a curious way they represent the docile subjects that governments secretly—or not so secretly—desire. Zombification is a powerful image of what governments try to do to their citizens—to create a uniform, homogenous population, incapable of acting independently.
In these narratives, the genesis of the zombies is usually some top-secret government project gone awry or immoral scientific experiment - that we neither asked for nor have control over. "What upsets people," continues Cantor, "is the sense that they are losing control of their lives in a world of impersonal and unresponsive institutions, and the fact that all this is happening on a global scale is especially unnerving."
(Baldovino Barani for the MILK X The Foster Twins Editorial via source)
However, where the zombies represent what happens when your body is there but your humanity is missing completely, the living - to stay that way - have to struggle for survival, giving their lives renewed meaning and purpose. Not unlike those old western movies of yore, points out Cantor. "The zombies play the role traditionally assigned to Indians in Westerns—the barbarian hordes lurking on the borders of the civilized community and threatening to annihilate it," he says. "Just like the Indians in many Westerns, the zombies are nameless and virtually faceless, they never speak, and they may be killed off indiscriminately, with their genocide being the apparent goal." By presenting an image of life on today's frontier, a government'less free-for-all, zombie flicks give viewers the chance to experience life without the safe-haven provided by a central government and the challenges of protecting yourself and your family using your skills with weaponry and your own ingenuity. "Once we realize that contemporary end-of-the-world scenarios share with Westerns the goal of imaginatively returning their characters to the state of nature, we can see how the American nightmare can turn into the American dream when rampaging aliens or zombies descend upon a quiet American suburb. The dream of material prosperity and security is shattered, but a different ideal comes back to life—the all-American ideal of rugged individualism, the spirit of freedom, independence, and self-reliance."
When life gives you zombies, make - or make that remake - life. Along with some ugly but undead-fabulous footwear.
- Lesley Scott
(illustration by Georgia Laughton via source)
NOTE: The aggressive feel of these Jeffrey Campbell boots is a signature of the Apocalytical fashion tribe which has a chic cloud of effitalltohellalready Doomsday & End Times that seems to follow them everywhere. For more of my posts and podcasts about the Apocalytical tribe, CLICK HERE. To learn more about each of fashion's four mega-tribes that I track, START HERE.
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