Shoes: Pleasure and Pain, the current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has lent itself to the introduction of this episode on Fetish. The shoes are an excellent fetish, perhaps because of the allusion of penetration and especially their objective value: they do not need to be worn to show their charm, unlike a garnet that, when abandoned on a chair, loses its consistency, becoming a rag.
The fetish has remote anthropological origins, its value and its symbols have wasted rivers of ink, starting with the French anthropologist, sociologist, ethnologist and historian of religions Marcel Mauss (May 10, 1872- February 10, 1950), known for his short book “The Gift” (1923). A fetish is an object that carries magic and divine powers, on which we rely to exorcise the evil eye, towards which one feels an affection bordering on veneration.
Starting from shoes, fetish par excellence, of which we provide a varied review, we present other fetish objects, such as lipstick, with a high compensatory value, ending with jewellery. It is no coincidence that the book “Scarperentola”(1993), which I edited for Idea book, presenting models of shoes created by artists and designers, has been printed in several languages and sold worldwide.

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