Stripper Heels and Dior
Stripper Black Patent Leather Fetish Boots (Google Shopping Search average): $120
Dior Patent Leather Ankle Boots Fall/ Winter 2015: $1800
Zara High Heel Sock Style Ankle Boots: $69.99, reduced to $30
A pair of boots listed on the ecommerce website for Spanish fast-fashion retailer Zara (High Heel Sock Style Ankle Boots) was originally priced at 70 dollars for their Fall 2015 cycle of clothing, and reduced during a sale to 29.99, the price at which I purchased them in early January 2016. The boots are black, tight, shiny faux patent leather ankle with a high heel.
The Dior Fall Winter 2015 runway show took place on March 6th 2015. A pair of boots from the collection retailed for approximately 1800 dollars. The boots were available in late 2015 in a number of dark colors. They are tight, shiny patent leather ankle boots with a high heel. The boots were designed by Raf Simons, originally a streetwear designer who began designing for Dior in 2012.
Black vinyl fetish boots have been available since the 1950s, rising to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the proliferation of the American porn industry. Penthouse and Playboy magazines have both featured iconic spreads of models wearing patent leather boots
In designing the Dior version of the fetish boot, social elements of the object become translated into a different “register.” The black patent leather high heeled boot was originated as a relatively inexpensive item. Its primary purpose was to be enhance the ability of women to be deemed attractive and sexually alluring to men viewing pornographic images. The shoe’s price reflects it’s cost of production and the market price of the generic “shoe” in 2016 relatively accurately.
The Raf Simons Dior version of the fetish boot allows for wealthy women to live vicariously through the sex worker. In payin 1800 dollars, the consumer attains not just a piece of footwear, but the signifiers related to wearing black patent leather. She is wearing commodified sex, appropriating the symbols of sexuality carved out by the sex worker's use of the symbol, and imbuing her own body with these societal, cultural cues. While sex work itself is stigmatized, it here registers as sexy and attainable, in order for a woman to transmit this meaning herself.
The Zara version of the boot is transmitting a dual symbol. As Barthes writes in the Fashion System, the adherence to a specific aesthetic and set of cultural norms sets up a dialectical relationship of Fashion and Not Fashion. Here, in wearing a boot that references the fashionable Dior item, in purchasing the Zara knockoff, a woman is engaging in Fashion. Simultaneously this paradigm may be employed to look at what is Sex and Not Sex. These boots are coded in the collective cultural consciousness as sex, piggybacking off of the trend here set by sex workers.
In this sense, sex workers have set a trend that manifests itself as a duality: the boots are fashion, and the boots are sex.