The Temporal Landscape of Shoes: A Life Course Perspective

Abstract

This empirically grounded article draws on an ESRC-funded project on footwear, identity and transition to offer new understandings of how a linear model of the life course may, in practice, be disrupted, subverted or reconfigured. Combining the insights of material culture and life course studies, it develops the notion of a temporal landscape of shoes within which their scope for interrupting life course temporalities can be explored. In particular, it identifies four temporal strategies made possible through the symbolic efficacy of footwear: the retrieval of an earlier identity through the purchase of styles previously worn; the deferral of later life by rejecting comfortable shoes that might symbolically reposition someone as ‘old’; the release of former age-based identities and the embracing of freedom from a felt need to wear impractical or painful shoes; the appropriation or reconfiguring of the past as a contemporary resource through the wearing of vintage/hand-me-down shoes.

You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there's a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent you can be author of your own fate. (Jamie, 2012: 71)

This article stems from a paper presented to the British Sociological Association's Ageing, Body and Society Study Group. Two years into an ESRC-funded project on footwear, identification and transition, ¹ we knew the importance of foot health for older adults; that lost mobility could undermine social and physical well-being. Yet to consider footwear and identity among older adults as primarily a question of how physiological changes reduce comfort and therefore choice is to reproduce stereotypes of later life as diminishment, and to privilege a linear model of time. Instead, what interests us is the ‘bit of room for manoeuvre’ that Jamie refers to, her suggestion that despite being placed in landscape and time, agency can be mobilized.

Consider the following account:

Christine, ² in her 60s, described how her mother, Ellen, changed from someone who hated ‘old age’, worried about her appearance, was obsessively busy with housework, to someone inactive and disconnected from life. Ellen had continued ballroom dancing into her late 70s, managing high-heels with style. But falls and deteriorating mobility forced her into ‘sensible’ shoes. Christine said, ‘when she died Susie, my daughter, and I … chose clothes for the coffin and the outfit … was smart – but still glamorous. We looked at [her] shoes and agreed that Nana could not be seen dead in them! In a … department store, we found just the right ones – … extremely elegant, not too high, looked expensive (indeed they were) and something she could wear to a dance…. Buying the shoes gave us a real sense of achievement … something really important … we knew she would have loved.’

For us, Ellen's never-to-be-danced-in shoes opened up what can be seen as a footwear ‘landscape’ where we could engage with the shoes an older person had worn across the life course. Born into a middle-class family, Ellen's war-time marriage initially led to a family life of great social and financial hardship until her eventual employment as a dinner lady. ³ In her daughter Christine's account, an apparently predictable life course trajectory – from the ‘sensible’ shoes of childhood into the fashionable heels associated with transitions to adulthood, on into the ‘sensible’ shoes of later life – was disrupted. In surrogate form, Ellen's dancing shoes made a final appearance, complicating her identity as someone ‘disconnected from life’.

As such, these shoes occupy a composite role as both objects and memory objects that stand in for other objects. Ellen's ‘sensible’ shoes provided only a snapshot of who she was – one type within an entire assemblage. This article argues that shoes remembered from earlier years, or indeed ‘recovered’ in some material form, can provide oblique insights into someone's life history, just as today's footwear and clothing can illuminate contemporary preoccupations. Medical research has asked how shoes worn in younger adulthood might contribute to later life foot problems (Branthwaite et al., 2013). Social scientists, concerned with the social as well as biological dimensions of embodied ageing, might well adopt a similar, if less causal life course perspective. Liechty and Yarnal noted the academic neglect of body image among older women, adopting a life course perspective that ‘highlights the influence of personal life events, historical changes and the individual's perceptions of and responses to such experiences’ (2010: 1198). Explaining its methodological effectiveness, they cite Bengtson et al., who argue that ‘the life-course perspective attempts to bridge the macro- and micro-levels of social-structural analyses by incorporating the effects of history, social structure, and individual meaning into theoretical and analytic models’ (1997, cited in Liechty and Yarnal, 2010: 1200). Rather than the fixed stages of the ‘life cycle’, a life course perspective also provides ‘a way of envisaging the passage of a lifetime less as the mechanical turning of a wheel and more as the unpredictable flow of a river’ (Hockey and James, 2003: 5).

The relationship between past and present has, however, been debated. Stanley (1992) and Misztal (2003) argue that recollections of the past are mediated by the concerns of the present; indeed they can be put to strategic use in autobiographical writing (Stanley, 1992). Narvaez (2006), however, warns against over-privileging the present. In the case of collective memory, if embodiment is given due consideration, he says it can ‘help us see how we can “naturally” carry, in our bodies, the strong presence of the past’ (2006: 59). Thus, while reminiscence may allow us to travel back in time on a ticket bearing today's date, a more materially grounded engagement with the past may release its capacity to make an unchanged contribution to the here-and-now. Indeed, where unwelcome aspects of the past are concerned, Sheringham describes ‘the unassimilable past lodg[ing] in the present like a foreign body’ (1993: 293).

Focusing on identity across the life course, this article argues that footwear can operate as something more than a vehicle for journeying to past times, along the lines of Proust's madeleines. While this facility is important, we need to give equal weight to the return journey; in other words, to recognize that shoes from the past may inform the present and, indeed, connect with one another.

The metaphor of a footwear ‘landscape’ is thus a valuable conceptual tool when exploring the temporalities of the life course. For Bachelard (1994 [1958]) time is an abstraction that cannot easily be relived; it ‘ceases to quicken the memory’ unless ‘the calendars of our lives’ can be ‘established in its imagery’ (1994 [1958]: 8-9, emphasis added). A grounding in landscape and locality is key here. Materialized in a lifetime's shoes, the past and the future can be mapped through landmark pairs. Moreover, shoes' associations with mobility offer the figurative and literal possibility of redrawing the map, of reconfiguring time. Footwear can thus be pivotal in enabling us to discover the ‘bit of room for manoeuvre’ that Jamie (2012: 71) realized whilst uncovering the deep historical time sedimented into today's Perthshire landscape. Moreover, as Appadurai argues, the suffix ‘scape’ indicates the ‘deeply perspectival’ nature of whatever it is attached to, showing it ‘inflected very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’, the individual actor being the last locus of any kind of perspectival (land)scape (1990: 3). This point is borne out in Olwig's account of how the seventeenth-century term ‘landscape’ initially referred to a kind of picture but subsequently came to denote its subject, ‘a portion of land that the eye can comprehend from a single view’ (1993: 320). In other words, a situated view. These are the aspects of the term landscape which make it so apt a metaphor for exploring people's relationships with the shoes they once wore, or anticipate wearing. Not only does it reflect the materializing of time's otherwise abstract nature – in this case, through footwear; it also connotes the situated, perspectival nature of human beings' temporal orientations and therein people's scope for re-imagining what was or what might be.

Indeed, an important aspect of this article's concern with a longer trajectory is the scope of shoes for interrupting life course temporalities; for example, by allowing earlier identities to be revisited or released, or the advent of future age-based identities to be accelerated or deferred.

Why shoes?

As Ellen's burial shoes indicated, footwear can be symbolically efficacious (Verdery, 1999). As such, it offered a lens through which to develop our work on identity (Hockey et al., 2007; Robinson and Hockey, 2011), particularly its processual and relational qualities (Jenkins, 2004; Lawler, 2008). In our project on masculinities in transition, for example, we focused on differences within rather than between men, as they moved between home and place of employment (Spector-Mersel, 2006). Asking how a male firefighter, estate agent or hairdresser might expect to look, move and generally conduct himself in order to ‘fit in’ at work and at home, we found gesture, posture and clothing a valuable means of engaging with identity as both embodied and inter-subjective (Hall et al., 2007).

This approach to identity as a process and practice – to identification-informs the current work on footwear. A particular pair of shoes, we argue, can enable, disable or orient individuals in distinctive ways. Furthermore, as people make transitions between pairs, the affordances of footwear come into being, contributing to movement between diverse aspects of an individual's identity within the flow of everyday life. In the data below, we show how shoes from the past or shoes that might be worn in the future can similarly be understood in terms of identity transitions, ones that reflect individuals discovering ‘room for manoeuvre’ (Jamie, 2012: 71) within the temporalities of the life course.

Materializing identity

Noting the presence of shoes, whether peeping beneath the hem of a bridal gown, or flashing past as someone runs 100 metres, is a starting point. But it does not explain how shoes, as objects, can enable identities and generate particular qualities of experience. To answer this we undertook empirical work in a large city in the north of England and developed a more phenomenologically oriented perspective on people and their footwear. Rachel Dilley, the project's research associate, completed 14 focus groups with social categories that included young women, young men, Muslim women, rock climbers, older adults, female ‘shoe lovers’, male ‘shoe lovers’, bereaved people who had dealt with someone's shoes after their death, people with foot health problems and parents who buy shoes for their children. This work, with around 80 people, allowed us to explore contemporary shoe-related understandings, images and experiences and was followed by year-long case studies with a similarly mixed sample of 15 people, all of whom lived in the same city. Case studies included repeat interviews, a log of shoes owned and worn, a shoe scrapbook, a filmed activity and a shoe-shopping trip. Participants were invited to show Rachel all their shoes during a first, filmed interview, and to photograph them.

So how do these shoes, plus those bought on the shopping trip or disposed of during the case study, relate to one another? And how do they reflect the shoes previously worn by both the participant and their friends and family -and indeed by famous/fictional individuals? As the data show, this landscape of shoes has particular temporalities, partly shaped by bodily ageing and the changing activities of everyday life, but also generated in more complex ways by participants who, for example, actively transposed age-based categories, as happened when Ellen died.

Such processes can be considered in relation to Parkin's (1999) work on another category of transitional object, the items displaced people take when leaving home. The ‘work’ achieved by objects that share an owner's spatial journey finds parallels in the temporal journeys of shoes and their wearers. Parkin called displaced people's transitional objects ‘mementoes of sentiment and cultural knowledge’ and argued that to understand their efficacy we must extend the post-Cartesian notion of the composite mind-body in order to incorporate the ‘social trails created by the movement of objects’ (1999: 303, emphasis added). From a phenomenological perspective, he suggests, people and objects are ‘mutually constituted’ via metaphoric and perceptual processes. While the trauma of displacement cannot be equated with growing older, particularly in good health, in both cases the individual is excluded from a place and/or time they cannot revisit. Indeed time, in some ways, creates a more insuperable distance.

This perspective begins to explain the resonance of particular shoes and their sometimes curious journeys and destinations. It reminds us that being 25 or 85, for example, is but one point of temporal entanglement within a more extensive terrain of previous or projected embodiments (Ingold, 2007: 103). And within these embodiments can be included particular shoes, examples of what Parkin calls ‘“attached” material-object imprints, a kind of socio-material prosthesis’ (1999: 304). While shoes might seem to lead people down a uni-linear path from cradle to grave, our data reveal their capacity to weave additional temporal and spatial journeys. Thus, as inhabitants of modern metropolitan societies, participants also undertook ‘tactical manoeuvring’ via ‘wandering lines’ or ‘efficacious meanderings’ (de Certeau, 1984, cited in Ingold, 2007: 103).

We are arguing, therefore, that knowing who we are partly derives from knowing who we have been; that memory is crucial to the ‘reforging’ of the self (Jenkins, 2004: 12). Antze and Lambek argue that ‘memory serves as both a phenomenological ground of identity … and the means for explicit identity construction’ (1996: xvi). Imagination, too, plays a part. How people envisage their futures has attracted academic attention: for example, the question of whether younger adults envisage a ‘destructured’ or ‘postmodern’ life course, or adhere to a consensus about what constitutes a ‘standardized’ life course (Brannen and Nilsen, 2002; Elchardus and Sims, 2006; Hockey et al., 2009; Blatterer, 2010). In sum, as Baars (2007) argues, ‘[w]hat we tend to think of as ourselves has a lot to do with the ability to situate our lives in the interrelated temporal dimensions of past, present and future’ (cited in Bytheway, 2011: 51). It is these theoretical perspectives that we advance through the ‘socio-material prosthesis’ (Parkin, 1999: 304) of shoes.

Tactical manoeuvres and the life course

Twigg's (2009) work on dress, identity and age asks whether chronological age, or age-ordering, shapes clothing choices – rather than social class. Arguing for a re-constituted form of age-ordering, she explores ‘how far older people enact or perform their age through the medium of dress and, more significant[ly], how far they are able to enact different versions through different, perhaps younger, forms of dress’ (2009: 9). While our concern is the life course, rather than later life, our data nonetheless reveal the prospect of old age informing shoe choice; and, by turn, show how shoes can contribute to and complicate a diversity of age-based identities.

If the broad distribution of age-based power and inequality is considered, it becomes apparent that in a Western society where autonomy, independence and individuality are core social values, the assumed dependency of children and older adults can undermine their personhood, status and citizenship rights (Hockey and James, 1993, 2003). Growing up into independent adulthood is a generally welcomed transition, while growing old is likely to be deferred. These broad social differences do materialize in footwear choices: girls may long for high-heeled ‘teenage’ shoes; adults may avoid footwear they associate with ‘old men’ or ‘old ladies’; older adults themselves may choose trainers as emblems of youthful fitness and leisure.

A consideration of what different shoe styles mean is therefore important in understanding people's choices when negotiating the process of ageing. Discursive theories of fashion often privilege communication; what we wear on our bodies ‘says’ something about us (Rubinstein, 1995; Barnard, 1996; Calefato, 1997). Some participants did think about their shoes like this, suggesting that a particular pair made them look youthful, fashion-savvy, expert in a certain sport, ‘available’, traditional, as if they live with a man; or frumpy, age-inappropriate or invisible. However, to see the relationship between shoes and identity as simply the outcome of consumption practices neglects the mediating roles played by other relationships and their intersections. These include: connections between individuals, often family members; between someone's feet, what they require of them and the shoes available; and between shoes themselves. The shoes featured here, for example, appear in data gathered in 2011-2012, yet many were bought and worn well before our study, some being no longer in the participant's possession – if indeed they ever were. Some belonged to other people, often a close relative, and again, may be long gone now. Somehow, though, they find their way into the data and on some level into the participant's life. How might they have contributed to someone's processes of identification – and continue to do so? As Miller and Woodward (2012: 63) reveal in research on blue jeans, among North Londoners, ‘the relationship to clothes … is in essence mainly an instrument in people's relationship to others, and to their personal life history’. This point recurs in Pilcher's work on children's clothing choices which reports them ‘ageing-up’, though ‘not necessarily to teenagehood or adulthood, but away from children younger than themselves’ (2012: 8).

Once we examine our data closely, then, a more interactive process of age-based identification becomes apparent. Abstract or impersonal versions of chronologized age or age-based stereotypes are limited resources when footwear is being appraised. Rather, individual aspirations for the future, personal memories of oneself when younger, and relationships with family members or friends constitute an important, meso-level where social interaction, whether face-to-face, remembered or imagined, can reframe the broader meanings of age-based identity (Robinson et al., 2012). As Jenkins argues, identification occurs via an internal-external dialectic between self-image and public image (2004: 20). Viewed from this perspective, chronological age becomes more than a numerical abstraction, instead interacting with the foot itself, plus the social and material contexts within which shoes are bought and worn. So, for example, a pair chosen by a 20-year-old woman with healthy feet and access to private transport, may be experienced as attractive and functional, yet be unwearable for someone of that age who has bunions or walks regularly, both to work and for leisure.

The role of objects in mediating relationships between people – and indeed the ways in which people mediate one another's relationships with objects, can, in addition, reflect the intersection of gendered inequalities with those grounded in age. While some male as well as female participants were reluctant to wear shoes they associated with older people, ageism was by no means the only issue that informed their choices. Certainly, as Sontag (1997 [1978]) argued, we found women more likely than men to monitor their bodies -including their feet – for indicators of ageing, from their twenties onwards. As such, they reflect Holland's (2004) review of feminist literature on gender and ageing which showed women being more heavily penalized for indicators of ageing, since associations between sexual and reproductive desirability and youthfulness are marked. Twigg (2013) echoes this point, referring to the invisibility of older women who may feel required to cover up bodily evidence of ageing in dull, self-effacing colours and fabrics.

How people and things intersect, and the implications for age and gender-based power, is, however, more than a matter of ageism. The data below do show female participants speaking derogatively about ‘unattractive old women's shoes’, ‘sensible middle-aged women's slippers’, the danger of becoming ‘a fuddy duddy’, but when they chose shoes that reflected an earlier aged identity or appropriated shoes from a previous era, it was also the opportunity to relive earlier pleasurable experiences, their own or those attributed to glamorous others, that attracted them; they were drawn to pairs with scope for the display of an idealized feminine aesthetic which a sensible styling had displaced (Dilley et al., forthcoming). Brydon (1998) argues that the sensible shoe on the female foot is about downplaying a woman's physicality. While for the academic woman, this allows conformity to the dress codes of a high status profession that ‘connects inextricably to the unmarked while male voice of authoritative knowledge’ (Brydon 1998: 4), for the mid-life woman it means ‘the dull, drab, dark, self-effacing, don't-look-at-me styles associated with age’ (Twigg, 2013: 8).

In sum, while women said more than men about age and ageing – as the data presented below reflect, some men also spoke aversively about ‘old bloke's shoes’ for as Twigg argues ‘[m]any of the strictures in relation to dress and older women apply also to men … [b]ut the pressure is less overt and the condemnation of transgression less harsh’ (2013: 5). Added to this, though, as argued above and shown in the discussion to follow, gender-based ageism is only partly the re-configuring of the life course and the diversity of temporal strategies reflected within our data.

Back to the future

When Schiermer warns against reifying the social, he also critiques the treatment of objects as ‘some kind of isolated and mute materiality’ (2011: 83). Instead, he says, ‘one should seek to portray the cultural and social praxis as going on between these extremes’ (2011: 83). As we utilize footwear to examine the way people situate themselves within the temporal landscape of their life course, we too focus on questions of praxis(Schiermer, 2011) and what Smart (2007) calls connectedness, that is, the creation of bonds, whether community, generational or family-based. Within our data four temporal strategies are evident. First, the linearity of the life course can be disrupted when an earlier identity is retrieved, as demonstrated through Ellen's burial shoes. Second, future time may be deferred; for example, some participants resisted comfortable shoes that might symbolically reposition them as ‘old’. Third, the past may be deliberately released, some participants embracing their freedom from a felt need to wear impractical or painful shoes. Fourth, the past may be appropriated, that is to say, reconfigured as a contemporary resource in the wearing of vintage/hand-me-down shoes.

Chronological age could figure within these strategies, for example, as a reference point through which to appraise shoes – and perhaps buy them. Catherine is a 61-year-old retired teacher living in a well-furnished apartment in an affluent suburb. Talking about the foot problems that limited her choice, she cited her husband's 70th birthday party as an encounter with the fact that ‘most of our friends are at least ten years younger than us, many are between 40 and 50’. For Catherine, being ‘ten years younger than us’ is not just a numerical issue; it accompanies her perception of her younger female friends as:

(from Catherine's scrapbook) … attractive and glamorous, they are mostly very slim and wear clothes which are expensive and close fitting, their dresses are just above the knee and they accessorise them with high heeled stiletto shoes, they all can walk in them and they all look better in them than in low heels or flats …

Catherine's age-based perceptions are of other women. Perceptions of oneself at an earlier age can also become a site of desirable attributes. Just as Narvaez (2006) shows how the past can be embodied in the present, potentially resistant to editing, so Turner argues that ‘we subjectively cling to an image of ourselves as unchangingly young’ (1995: 250). Yet the body's appearance, when viewed on camera, for example, may fracture that image, reminding us that the body is ‘a walking memory’ (Turner, 1995: 250). In the following discussion of the four temporal strategies evident in our data, we show chronological age and the linearity of the life course being not only drawn upon, but also disrupted and subverted.

1. The past retrieved

Pauline, from the female ‘shoe lovers’ focus group, was a shop assistant. She had worn flat shoes as a younger parent. Turning 40, she wanted to recover an earlier femininity achieved by wearing high heels. They were, for her, the kind of biographical object which Hoskins describes ‘anchor[ing] the individual to a particular time and place’ (1998: 8). For Pauline, chronological age provided a rationale when explaining the 40 pairs of shoes she bought in four weeks, around the time of her birthday:

I think I got to 40 and I thought well might start wearing high heels again … I adore my heels and my partner's like you've never worn them for years, what's got into you woman? I say age, it must be something because I wore them from … 16 right up to the age of 30, had my son and I wouldn't wear them for like, 12 … then … something went to my head when I got to 40, I need high heels … and I bought forty pairs of shoes in … I think it were four weeks.

As this example suggests, fear that growing older inevitably undermines personhood and particularly femininity could be clearly felt at birthdays that marked a new decade. Luna was a 29-year-old community project worker living in a mixed urban neighbourhood with her husband. She went shoe shopping with Rachel just before turning 30. She wanted high-heeled shoes like her friends, something she had worn when younger. Like Pauline who abandoned high heels on parenthood, Luna had worn flat, supportive shoes as a teacher. However, when interviewed, Luna emphasized her concern about shoes that might damage her feet.

Through case study work we explored this contradiction, Luna wishing to retrieve an earlier age-based identity, yet worrying about the footwear that would enable it. Her relationship with her feet and her shoes emerged partly out of interactions with both her Fijian Indian family of origin and her husband's local Muslim family. When Rachel visited Luna, she opened the door in socks. During the interview she said:

I'm wearing socks today because my nails are embarrassing but normally I'd be, even on a colder day, I'd be in the house barefoot or with slippers …

Thus Luna valued both the health and the appearance of her feet. They were a matter of pride. She recalled clubbing in high-heeled shoes at university, often removing them eventually, for comfort. However, unlike other female participants, for Luna this did not undermine her appearance:

I've taken my shoes off in a night club and just sat there because they're so painful … and then men have approached me to say ‘you've got beautiful feet’ or, you know, ‘how come your feet are sore, I'll massage them for you’ … it's been like a running joke with my friends that … Luna … picks up using her feet …

Her ‘beautiful’ bare feet are, however, no accident. Of her frequent pedicures, she said:

I think that might be a family thing because my mum's also really big on it and so is my dad on, on foot health and grooming … because my dad's extremely well groomed and his feet and his toenails are all perfect … I've always grown up not wearing shoes in the house and our feet have always been on display, living in a hot country.

Temperature is only part of the story. The distant past of Luna's Indian great grandparents was also important. They had moved to Fiji, a social and geographical transition which meant that:

… we've got our own definition of culture now … which is similar to the Indian culture but it's got a different twist to it … we've incorporated a lot of our, with this massage and stuff, it's very Fijian to massage … and we've picked that up … I can remember being massaged, even as a child…. it's my way of kind of relaxing and winding down …

Luna's more recent transition – from life in Malaysia and Australia to the north of England where her Muslim in-laws live – had similar cultural implications, the weather also diminishing outdoor, shoe-wearing opportunities. The presence of family further militated against her wearing high-heeled shoes. With another transition planned, back to Australia for her husband's work, she said:

I think hopefully in Perth it'll be different with us going out a bit more than we normally would, and also here … it's a different place for me and it's not somewhere where I probably am able to dress the way that I'd like to dress or the way that, you know, go to the places that I'd … normally go to because my husband's from a very strict family and he's got family here and … I've got, I've got to watch, you know, be conscious of that.

As she explained, high-heeled shoes themselves were not the problem. It was the overall assemblage of clothing that might contravene family practices:

… back home or anywhere else … I don't have that restriction of, oh well somebody might mind if I wear this or, that's too short … I wouldn't wear a short skirt here whereas back in Perth or … Sydney … I'd be more inclined to wear a higher heel … with that …

Turning 30, Luna wanted high-heeled shoes for the Australian open-air social life she anticipated. Whilst her transition promised an escape from her in-laws, maintaining healthy, well-groomed feet was also important, part of how Luna lived out her Fijian Indian identity. Talking through her scrapbook, she paused over an image of high-heeled shoes, saying,

I still think they're absolutely gorgeous and if I did see a pair like them I probably would buy them just to have them and admire them and wear them on, you know, very, very … [occasional days] … I think they look subtle yet really classy and, you know, really elegant and feminine like the, the lines are really feminine, curvy …

However, her admiration constantly intersected with a contradictory set of observations:

I just can't do it, I can't do it anymore … I think as I get older the things that I do with myself, my body or, they impact me more now than, you know, the consequences of them, even though I'm still only 30 … I'm thinking very far ahead … If only they … made nice glittery Clarks sandals.

Luna's ambivalence can be understood in terms of a spatio-temporal footwear landscape that encompasses not only the influence of her families of origin and marriage, but also, at the point of geographical transition to Australia, the many shoes she possessed, will dispose of, and has put into store. In addition, the inclement British weather, her husband's preference for her to wear high-heeled shoes, her friends' shoes, her work and her clothes all contribute to what she puts on her feet. Although we have identified important lines of orientation within this shoe landscape, it remains densely populated. And that is precisely the point. What Luna told us is, in itself, but a route travelled through this landscape, an ‘efficacious meandering’ (Ingold, 2007: 103), that allows her to engage with her past, present and future. As she is about to make the transition to a new decade and yet again set up home, ageing figures, as she looks back to particular eras and forwards to the future well-being of her feet.

Both Luna and Pauline, who bought 40 pairs of shoes, drew on previous shoe-related experience to retrieve aspects of an earlier feminine identity. While Ellen's burial shoes enabled a similar temporal transposition, her family were necessary intermediaries. Ellen would never dance in her glamorous shoes. Although the living body afforded people more scope for temporal disruption, it could also constrain them. Luna was aware that high-heeled shoes might damage her feet. Catherine knew walking in the shoes her younger friends preferred would hurt. Showing Rachel her favourite diamante and silver kitten-heeled sandals, she said, ‘when I actually walk I go slither, slither, slide … under my toes hurts and across the top of my foot hurts …’. What becomes evident here, then, is that the landmark shoe which enables particular temporal strategies and resources a re-imagining of the life course is in itself a dynamic entity with the kind of cultural biography that Kopytoff (1986) refers to. Not only can it anchor an individual in time – if only temporarily, but in undergoing spatio-temporal relocation as that individual grows older, the shoe itself can shift in meaning, for example from elegant prosthetic of the self (Gonzalez, cited in Lupton, 1998: 144), to uncomfortable impediment to movement (see also Hockey et al., forthcoming).

2. The future deferred

Nellie, a widow from the bereaved people's focus group, lived in a mixed residential area of the city. When she said: ‘I just feel at 73 I shouldn't be wearing high heel shoes anymore’, other participants asked why not. Nancy, another widow and from a similar residential area, said ‘You're as old as you feel … so wear what you want … my mother wore them until she were 80 odd’. Their debate reveals a variant on the manoeuvre of retrieving a former age-based identity. Here, individuals make a case for deferring the future and flouting age-appropriate dress (Twigg, 2009). Catherine said:

… you imagine … at some point in your life, flip a switch, and you won't want to wear certain clothes anymore, and, so the fashionistas say … you should actually dress age appropriately but if you feel younger and you want to wear something that is associated with younger people, you're going to feel better, aren't you, because you are geared to youth being the best bit, everybody is programmed to youth being the best bit, so I suppose you try to look younger, you try to dress younger, you pile stuff on your face to try and make you stay younger looking … nobody ever says I want to feel old …

For Catherine, this is a self-evident appraisal of human beings’ temporal landscape. The ageist attribution of negative qualities to later life is, as Bytheway notes, ‘endemic and insidious’ (2011: 10). As argued, chronological age is more than an abstraction; it has consequences for ‘classes of people who are systematically denied resources and opportunities that others enjoy’ (Bytheway, 2011: 14). Throughout the data, then, shoes are judged for their age-based associations – and those evoking later life could be stigmatized. Although footwear manufacturers such as Clarks no longer market to particular age groups, attitudes and lifestyles being seen as a more reliable indicator of difference, an age-based aesthetic still informs consumer decisions. Zoe, at 42, was a mature student, a parent separated from her partner and living in a mixed residential area of the city. Whilst shopping with Rachel, she said that she felt like a ‘fuddy duddy’ because she avoided high-heeled shoes, yet associated Scholls with older women wearing shoes made to fit properly. Brands could thus signify age-based identity. Catherine, at 61, sought to dissociate herself from

… those middle-aged women across there [her fellow choir members] … one woman wears like children's Clarks sandals and somebody else wears orthopaedic shoes … there's all these lace ups and really unattractive old women's shoes …

For some participants, fear of ‘growing old’ had even more personalized dimensions – and footwear allowed this to be articulated. Julie, a 25-year-old marketing officer living on a busy main road in a working class area of the city, took part in our generic focus group. She said:

… I have bunions, delightfully, which run in my mum's side of the family and mine aren't particularly bad but hers are and she told me that when she was in her teens she looked at her mum and thought ‘oh Mum your feet are so disgusting I'm so glad mine aren't like that’ and now they are, so I think [laughs] it's reasonable for me to assume that I'm going to have particularly unattractive feet in later life and … I wouldn't say that I'd choose my shoes to try and avoid that happening but … the shoes I … wear now aren't ones I find particularly appealing … will that situation become worse as I get older?

Julie described her mother's shoes as ‘dreadful’ – too bright, and designed for comfort not style. This made Julie think that:

… it might be that in the same way that now I choose generally not to wear heeled shoes because I find it unacceptably uncomfortable, maybe by the time I'm in my 60s I might find it unacceptably uncomfortable to wear shoes like I wear now and I might have to wear these ones that I think are really dreadful …

So an undesirable future might be deferred on generic grounds, or for more personal reasons. However, if people did wear shoes associated with an older age group, perhaps for comfort, the risks of a reconfigured life course could still be averted. While the internal-external dialectic of identification (Jenkins, 2004: 20) may be pursued internally as we incorporate other people's opinions into our self-identity, ‘public’ image remains important. So if individuals wear shoes they judge will move them towards a future age-based social category, they may still avoid that identity by doing so only in private.

Zoe, for example, had a pair of very comfortable sports sandals. She said:

… they're comfortable in the worst possible, there's no style to them, they're just really ugly and I've been on long walks in the countryside with them but I just can't really look down at my feet. … they're drab and dowdy and I feel drab and dowdy and old, I feel about 60 when I wear these … I do wear them on the allotment where I don't see anyone apart from my neighbour who doesn't notice things like that anyway …

Interestingly, for Zoe, even the distance between her eyes and feet creates a kind of internal-external dialectic and she maintains this separation to avert an experience of herself as ‘about 60’.

When Catherine read from her scrapbook she similarly stated that:

These are sensible, these are the slippers of a middle-aged woman with cold feet … I've drawn my new fluffy slippers, there, see. … They're okay, and I wouldn't let anybody see them …

One final strategy for deferring the future is to reconfigure later life as a category one never need enter, like a different ethnicity or gender. This can be attempted through age-neutral footwear. Zoe said of her Doctor Martens shoes:

I wanted them to look nice as well, I didn't want them to look like … a sort of … old people's shoes, [laughs] so, these were very comfortable and fitted well.

While women were more likely to choose shoes that potentially deferred later life, some men shared this concern. David, aged 59, was a semi-retired management consultant and student, married and living in a middle-class suburb. He said:

… as I get older I understand the semiotics of fashion less and less, so … finding stuff that I'm comfortable about wearing that doesn't send out old blokes' signals, is quite important … at the moment the solution's Doctor Martens because they seem to have that combination of functionality and, and reasonably pleasing design.

3. The past released

Reviewing the gerontological literature on consumption culture and the reconfiguration of old age, Twigg suggests that ‘old age may properly be a time of transcendence and disengagement from the physical, a time to leave the body behind in the pursuit of other aspects of the self’ (2009: 12). Somewhat negatively, however, she associates this with Williams and Bendelow's (1998) work on chronic illness where individuals manage ‘bodily failure’ (Twigg, 2009: 13) by separating mind and body. This leads her to suggest that in later life, investment in bodily appearance may reflect the law of diminishing returns.

Transcendence can, however, be understood more positively. In her work on alternative femininities, Holland cites 29-year-old Kiki who imagines a waning pressure to be sexual as she ages, something that could be ‘a release’ (2004: 119). This is reflected in Richards et al.‘s work on representations of older women which found that ‘women in their 50s-60s felt more pressure from media and advertising imagery compared with participants in their 80-90s’ (http://www.newdynamics.group.shef.ac.uk/nda-findings-10.html). Among women in the latter category, one said ‘we're too old to take ourselves seriously’, a remark that stimulated a photography project where the older women were ‘given the space to “let their guard down” or “let themselves go” and to enter into the spirit of humorous play’ (2012: 76).

Transcendence can also involve a reappraisal of values. Though Sontag (1997 [1978]) describes a double standard of ageing where women, rather than men, are penalized for looking older, Krekula (2007) showed that among the 16 Swedish women aged between 75 and 96 with whom she carried out focus groups, the weighting ascribed to beauty had been revised. Though appearance mattered, competence, confidence, health and independence were more important sources of self-worth for her interviewees. Furman's (1997) ethnography of older women in a New York beauty parlour similarly showed that a release from dependency and the obligation to please others, plus a new sense of self-determination, were valued alongside a concern with appearance.

Positive forms of transcendence, where individuals affirm a sense of freedom, are evident within our data from older adults. A 62-year-old focus group participant, Annie, was retired and lived in a mixed residential area of the city. She said:

I think as you get older, you're not worried about the fashion, you're more comfortable, you've got to get comfortable shoes, you know, you're getting past that silly stage possibly, so I never worry about fashion and comfort. [laughs]

Other focus group members revealed that, coupled with freedom from the requirements of the ‘silly stage’, stoicism could be important. Several had had foot surgery and one woman said:

I've just had one foot done, the other one should be done but as you get older you learn to live with things, I've just got lumps on the instep but I don't have any pain.

The group as a whole, both women and men, asserted the value of comfort over fashion when Rachel asked what considerations they took into account when shopping:

Female:

Sensible.

Male:

Aye, that's right, sensible.

Female:

I think everybody does that.

Female:

Comfort, comfort.

Some participants also spoke enthusiastically about new shoe sizing and how this enabled comfort:

Female:

Well there's all different kinds of sizes now, isn't there? You know, like if you've got fat feet and you can get E, double E, whatever, whereas when you were younger it were just …

Female:

… squash your feet in.

Female:

Everything fits all.

So while these women recalled the pleasure of high-heeled ‘court’ shoes, comfort was prioritized; recollections of painful ‘heels’ evoked laughter and, yet again, a sense that this was a ‘silly stage’ now left behind – a past released.

Pride in a life-time's care for one's feet was also expressed, particularly in connection with family-based lay health beliefs.

Female:

… my granddad always told us to look after our feet and I have done and touch wood I'm lucky, I do look after my feet.

Female:

Well my gran did, told me I'd got to look after my feet and if you couldn't walk out of the shop in your shoes, don't buy them.

4. The past appropriated

Rather than retrieved, as in the case of Ellen, Luna and Pauline, the past was also appropriated by participants who wore vintage or hand-me-down shoes. While some practised eBay shopping for ethical reasons, to minimize consumption, others actively sought shoes from a previous era to accompany a vintage wardrobe. Rather than dressing as they had in earlier life, they were engaging in what Gregson and Crewe call ‘transformative practices in time and space’ (2003: 143), ones which can release the ‘imaginative potential of commodities’ (2003: 146), a kind of re-enchantment.

Here, 32-year-old Eva who worked in the accounts department of a local college and lived in a social housing apartment block, talked about her favourite type of shoe, two-tone brogues:

… I'd always dreamed of owning a pair … I wear them when I'm getting proper dressed up and I want to feel … when I'm going to for a kind of 1940s Joan Crawford style look and I always feel a million dollars in them.

Gregson and Crewe argue that the appropriation of objects from former historical eras allows individuals to ‘construct a personalized way of dressing which emphasizes difference, individuality and knowingness’ (2003: 149). In other words, such objects effectively resource identity work. However, as Eva noted, high street shops now sell re-makes of vintage shoes, both the two-tone brogues and the brothel creepers (crepe-soled lace-ups) she likes:

… broths used to be a way of spotting a member of the subculture, someone who … had a rock and roll sensibility, the kind of person you could have a random chat with and find something in common, it was like a shorthand … now, everybody's got them on so … there's a little thing that doesn't exist anymore because … it was private and now it's public …

Gregson and Crewe (2003) also note the practice of appropriating the clothing – or clothing styles – of former family members. This, they suggest, ‘relies less on specific, researched and intellectualized reconstruction and rather more on romantic imaginings …’ (2003: 151). They cite Steven, a 30-something graduate and artist, who described ‘wanting to dress like my Granddad, wanting to have the same cut of suit in the same era …’ (2003: 152). The capacity of clothing and footwear to embody ‘imaginative history’ (2003: 153) is also demonstrated by our participant, 63-year-old Rob, a retired town planner who lived with his wife in an affluent suburb. For him, the emphasis on quality, which Gregson and Crewe (2003) highlight among the collectors of vintage objects, meshed with his personal connection with his father. Of his father's shoes he said,

… these are good, these are my dad's shoes, these are K's shoes … I should mention that [my] better quality shoes are … nearly always made in … England … my dad died in 1989 … they'd hardly been worn I'm sure, and they just happened to fit me exactly … they're beautifully comfortable … I only wear them when it's a wedding or a funeral … So these are my dad's shoes … he would have worn them for best … going to some do or other. … might have worn them on a bank holiday to go to Llandudno with my mother … I love them.

So for Rob, his father's shoes combine two sought-after elements: they connect him with a family member whose style he admires and, being ‘Made in England’, stand for traditional design and quality. In addition they mediate current relationships with Rob's siblings, a form of connectedness (Smart, 2007), he describes in discussion of his scrapbook:

… dad's shoes, and where they came from, the shop he bought them in … and it's also about how my brother and sister and I divided things up when they, both my parents died, and how that was sort of done quite amicably. … Pop's shoes, are a … reminder of … the process … I wore them for my sister's birthday last March, told her I was wearing Pop's shoes and she was quite excited about that [laughs] …

These data show the presence of footwear within praxis, during everyday life and on special occasions. The shoes of the dead also appear in other participants' data – as indeed they did in their homes. When widowed 73-year-old Nellie, referred to above, was asked if there were shoes she associated with her husband, she said:

… a pair of slippers that most of the time lived at side of the fireplace instead of on his feet and are still at the side of the fireplace hoovered every, well every time I hoover, and will remain so, erm, well that's it, they just live there. Other things, a lot of other things, I've got rid of down the years but they still live there and there they will always be …

For another widow, 63-year-old Valerie, who lived in a thirties residential area in the city, her husband's shoes quite literally stood in for him, assuming his role as a protective presence. Valerie had heard that widows should leave a man's clothing on show, ‘so my husband's shoes are still in the hall’, she said.

In reappropriating the shoes of the past in these ways, then, participants are establishing a range of connections – with a particular era and its glamour, for example, or with older family members who may have predeceased them.

Conclusion

This article makes extensive use of a life course perspective in exploring the ways in which the shoes we were ‘shown’ by our participants, whether described or in material form, contributed to processes of identification; these involved interactions between family members and friends, and between someone's feet and their everyday life. With its capacity to work at the intersection between ‘the macro- and micro-levels of social-structural analyses’ (Bengtson et al., 1997, cited in Liechty and Yarnal, 2010: 1200), a life course perspective also incorporates broader cultural dimensions, here ranging from the chronologization and stereotyping of ageing, through to the diversity of femininities and the ethics of consumption.

In response to one particular account – the purchasing of Ellen's burial shoes – we have developed the concept of a shoe landscape, one that incorporates the breadth and range of footwear introduced by participants. As a spatial metaphor for the otherwise abstract concept of time, the notion of landscape also connotes a perspectival view of the life course, as imagined -and re-imagined, by the spatially and temporally situated individual. This approach opens scope for new understandings of the ways in which a linear model of the life course may, in and through practice, be disrupted, subverted or reconfigured. While shoes may become integral to embodied experience, a ‘prosthetic’ of the self (Gonzalez, cited in Lupton, 1998: 144), they remain manipulable objects with potential symbolic efficacy. Brydon describes them ‘stand[ing] in for an unobtainable whole, a lack or a longing’, one that ‘may also make imaginable completeness and wholeness’ (1998: 7). Through their appraisal, purchase, ownership, wear and divestment, shoes are thus potent or symbolically efficacious objects that can enable tactical temporal strategies which – if only fleetingly – secure the ‘bit of room for manoeuvre’ that renders someone author of their own fate (Jamie, 2012: 71).