Author: William A. Rossi, DPM Published: Podiatry Management, October 2001 (Building Your Footwear Practice)
Note: This is an original summary, not the full article. The complete text and all figures remain copyright of Podiatry Management.
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Summary
Rossi reframes “fashion” — usually dismissed as vanity — as one of the most powerful forces in human nature, rooted in two deep drives: status and sex attraction. Because of that, he argues, warning women about foot health hazards has never worked and never will; podiatry needs to understand the psychology rather than scold it.
He sets foot deformation inside a long human history of deliberately reshaping the body for status: tight-laced corsets that permanently deformed rib cages, neck rings, stretched earlobes and lips, filed teeth, and more. The foot, he argues, has been perhaps the most consistently deformed part of all — and shoes have been the chief instrument. He traces pointed toes back 3,000 years to ancient Egypt (a status marker distinguishing upper-caste feet from laborers’), through chopines and platform shoes, to Chinese footbinding, all driven by class signaling rather than function.
A central and provocative section introduces what he calls “pedalgolagnia” — foot pain quietly tolerated, even welcomed, for the rewards of fashion — which he ties to a broader argument about female masochism in dress, supported by quotes from sexologists and clothing historians. The recurring image is the woman who kicks off her painful heels under the table yet would never give them up.
He is careful to insist men are not excluded: men’s feet are also deformed, just less dramatically, through laced “corseting” of the foot, crooked lasts, pointed toes, heavier rigid soles, and narrow widths. His blunt conclusion is that in any shoe-wearing society there is no such thing as a truly natural or normal foot — only shoeless feet qualify — and that all footwear, “sensible” or fashionable, is designed for the already-deformed civilized foot.
He ends with a challenge to his own profession: stop calling fashion footwear “crippling” and women “slaves of vanity,” because that stance solves nothing. Instead he urges podiatry to engage human nature as it actually is, and to develop the neglected field of foot esthetics (“pedoesthetics” / pedacosmetics), since roughly 80% of foot ills are shoe-related and fashion footwear is not going away.