In a large opinion poll in 2010, 40% of a sample of UK women said they judged other women by the shoes that they wear.  In this recent interview, I talk about how people infer meanings from shoes.  I also explain how shoes can help people to build a character for themselves that best matches a particular social context (so-called “dressing for success”).

I’m here today talking with Dr Andrew Wilson from the Linguistics Department at Lancaster University. We’re going to be chatting about how shoe styles function as a communication code. So, Andrew: shoes seem like an odd topic for a linguist to home in on. How did you first get interested in studying shoes?

AW:  Well, I guess it all goes back to when I was still at school. I remember seeing a short news item in our family newspaper which claimed that people tended to wear more sharp-toed shoes when there is a right-leaning government and blunt-toed ones when there is a left-leaning government. I was fascinated by the idea that something as mundane as shoes could be tied into a larger network of ideologies and meanings. And the interest just grew from there.

So how long have you been studying shoes now?

AW:  About 13 years, on and off. I started researching it seriously in around 2003. To date, I’ve mainly focussed on women’s business styles, but I’ve also touched on other things, such as employee uniforms.

Your mention of business styles and employee uniforms reminds me of the notion of “dressing for success”…

AW:  Yes – there’s certainly a very strong “dress for success” angle to it. If you want to find the best-fit style for a particular work context, you’ve really got to align what the shoes are saying with a set of organizational values. You’ve got to find out what those institutional values are, know what the different shoe styles are saying, and then do your best to match them up. I’d go so far as to say that shoes can be considered to be a part of a rhetorical repertoire.

Is that not be going a bit far? After all, surely shoes are only a small part of our overall appearance?

AW:  No, not at all. A large-scale opinion poll in 2010 found that 40% of UK women admitted to judging other women by the shoes that they wear. So they’re an important potential channel for self-communication.

OK. So, what sorts of meanings do shoes have for people? For instance, if you were meeting me for the first time, what would you infer from my shoes?

AW:  It’s mostly what rhetoricians call “ethos” – that’s the impression we get of someone’s overall character. The most important things that people read off from shoes are the broad personality traits. In early studies with shoes, I found that these tend to collapse down to two main ones: one to do with pleasantness or friendliness; the other to do with power, strength, and dynamism. They’re familiar dimensions in a whole range of social and personality theories. If you cut each of them into two, you end up with a four-space: friendly strength, hostile strength, friendly weakness, and hostile weakness. For instance, you’re wearing riding boots today, and people tend to see those as falling into the area of friendly strength.

That’s a nice place to be…

AW:  Yes. And beyond the broad personality traits, you get a range of more specific or concrete connotations to do with wealth, intellect, interests, political and moral orientations, interaction styles, and so on. Riding-boot wearers tend to be seen as down to earth, practical, and a bit sporty.

I see. Are shoes a lot like words then, given that they carry meanings for people?

AW:  To a certain extent, yes. But there are important differences. For one thing, shoes connote rather than denote. That’s to say we can’t just look up a fixed meaning for a pair of shoes in a dictionary. What they do is carry associations. There is bound to be some variation in what different people read into them, because people have such different interests, life experiences, and so on. That’s where the associations come from – all the stuff we watch, read, experience, and talk about. Nevertheless, some are more dominant than others, because they are more widespread in discourse. What we’re dealing with are broad trends in what people tend to associate with a style, rather than a firm prediction about what Mr or Ms “X” specifically is going to think.

But there are two important things that shoes do have in common with words. First, they have a meaningful internal structure, and second, they go on to form part of larger complex structures of meaning.

Can you give me an example of what you mean by a meaningful internal structure?

AW:  I mean, we can all name different parts of a shoe – toe, heel, and so on. These obviously vary in shape and style from one shoe to another – some shoes have broad squared-off toes, others have sharp pointed ones. Some shoes have low, flat heels; others may have a sharp three-inch stiletto. The point is that, within a broad general shoe category – such as knee-high boots – the shapes and styles of the component parts – the little details – can greatly change the meaning. There’s a big difference between what people tend to read off from flat riding boots, like the ones you’re wearing, and what they read off from a sharp-toed stiletto boot. Both personalities come across as strong, but, as we’ve said already, the riding boot tends to have friendly and down-to-earth associations. On the other hand, the wearer of stiletto boots tends to be seen as less friendly – they might come across as rather more dominating and arrogant. Of course, that might be just the right choice for some institutional contexts, but not for others.

You also mentioned that shoes form part of larger complex structures.

AW:  Yeah. By that I really meant two things. First, that they pick up meanings from what goes on around them and what people do with them. Second, that they form part of a repertoire of other things – objects, attributes, behaviours, etc. – which can all convey a similar meaning. I think we’re going to see an example of that in a moment.

The title of this interview mentions the word “performance”. How do you see shoes as part of performance?

AW:  I think it’s important to recognize that we are all performers. The pioneering American sociologist Erving Goffman said it already back in the 1950s. At the end of the day, it’s all about context. As we move from context to context, we’re switching constantly between different roles and, consequently, different ways of speaking and interacting. And this is what “dress for success” is basically all about: choosing and projecting a chosen image in a given context. It’s tied in with what we sometimes call “accommodation” – aligning your communicative style with that of the people you are interacting with. What we’re dealing with here is characterization – it’s where drama and real life overlap.  We’re playing a character, whether we’re an actor in a film or just going about our everyday working lives. And it’s worth remembering what some professional actors have said: they only really get into character when they put on that character’s shoes.

Can you maybe give us an example of how shoes have been used for characterization in a film or TV show? It might give us an idea of how this all works in practice.

AW:  A good example would be from the film “Hope Springs”, made in 2003 – the one with Minnie Driver, not the more recent one that has Meryl Streep in it. There’s a scene where Minnie Driver’s character gets out of a car and walks over to someone’s office. You don’t actually see her face until she gets into that office, but you’re already building up an impression of her character from other cues. Indeed, the very first thing you actually see of her is her shoes. She’s climbing out of a car. They’re classic leather court shoes, dark brown, with a rather high stiletto heel. When people respond to these sorts of shoes in surveys, they tend to see their typical wearers as strong, capable, successful, businesslike, maybe a bit ambitious. And that’s reinforced by the first thing she does with them: she grinds out a cigarette. Quite a dominant, provocative, decisive action.

So would this be an example of what you called a larger complex structure?

AW:  Yes, it would; and there’s even more to it than that. As well as the shoes and the cigarette grinding, we also get to see how she moves – she has a definite spring in her step, and she swings her handbag as she walks. That’s all backed up by some upbeat, brassy, big-band-style music. And we even get a glimpse of her sheepskin-trimmed coat and the big black shiny car she’s arrived in. All of this is signalling broadly the same set of personality traits and associations. To a certain extent, you can mix and match the cues, but you’ve got to be a bit careful, because not all combinations will project the same message – you need some expertise in reading and combining these things.

You’ve mentioned surveys a couple of times. Is that how you are able to decode these meanings?

AW:  Talking to people, and quantifying what they say, is very important – as I said earlier, these sorts of associations can be quite specific to individuals, so we need to talk to a decent sample in order to get an idea of typicality or unusualness. But discourse analysis – looking in detail at individual texts, images, and films – is also important, like the scene we’ve just talked about. It tells us a lot about how shoes cluster with other meaningful codes. And the media are one of the main sources of dominant ideology; they strongly influence how people see things.

It sounds like there’s a whole lot more we could talk about here.

AW:  Indeed.

But that’s all we have time for today. It’s been really interesting. Thank you for talking to us.

AW:  Always happy to discuss it.