AS THE LITERARY EDITOR OF this paper observed to me: “You can't imagine, can you, a serious study of the history of — say — trousers?” Certainly not. But this tome — almost 450 heavy, glossy pages — is devoted (and I use the word advisedly) to just such a study of shoes. And about time too, says Manolo Blahnik, high priest of shoe designers — “At last a work that deals not only with the history of footwear, but also with its cultural significance.”

“Cultural significance?” Oh yes. Shoes turn out to have more cultural significance than almost anything in our daily lives except language and money — and even, at times, to transcend both of those.

Despite the irritating coloured pages and frequently eye-popping illustrations (the editors are anxious that the book is not off-puttingly academic — hence, presumably, the grotesque fetish shoes by Vivienne Westwood on the jacket), this volume is a serious study. Nineteen chapters by various shoe anthropologists explore foot coverings, and their meanings, from their practical classical beginnings (though Perseus’ winged sandals were hardly everyday . . .) through the first clear cultural and social denotations (the high-platformed chopine of the Venetian courtesan, the Wellington boot of the cavalry officer) to the finely tuned self-identification and self-representation of footwear today (the designer trainer, the Blahnik limousine shoe).

Not all the contributors , unfortunately, can write (the chapter on “queer shoes” is almost incomprehensible) but all of them are engagingly passionate about their particular footwear niche, be it red shoes, or the image of masculinity, or bark clogs among the Yoruba of Africa. And all of them reinforce the theme of the book, which is that shoes, far from being merely the frivolous focus of the obsessive female consumer, “encapsulate a huge range of meanings, prejudice and tensions in society”. Thus Imelda Marcos’s impressive shoe wardrobe signified to every Filipino peasant just how far removed their First Lady was from the paddy field. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the very presence — or absence — of shoes is one of the most recorded facts in history.

It is the history, in fact, which is the most revealing part of this book. It emerges that the Ancient Greeks were, for the most part, shod, not just because it was practical, but because shoes indicated involvement with the outside, public world — those sandals left at the threshold of modern Greek houses are symbolic, not houseproud.Equally intriguing is the effect of 18th-century “improvements” in British cities, which provided the first public spaces and thus an opportunity to walk — not an occupation for satin boudoir slippers.

Indeed, walking itself, whether you were a Napoleonic foot soldier or a Renaissance courtesan, dictated much of a shoe’s use and therefore its message — the infamous chopine, evolved from the humble clog, was almost impossible to walk in, thus making a woman simultaneously imperious in her elevation and utterly dependent in her movement. No prizes for making the erotic connection there.

Of course, erotic connections are everywhere in this book. It’s interesting to note that while women have always loved shoes, they are not fetishist about them: it’s men who form what The Chambers Dictionary primly calls “a pathological sexual attachment” to women’s shoes. Hardly a stone is left unturned — or unillustrated — in this department because, as one writer remarks “the erotic currency . . . of the high heel .

. . has remained unchallenged”. Not least, I suspect, because it is the complete polar opposite to that poignant image at the other end of the shoe spectrum, “barefoot and pregnant”.

I can’t quite see a home for this handsome book, beyond the library of Jimmy Choo’s alma mater, the Cordwainers College, but I’m glad to have read it. What meaning and message there’ll be, in the windows of L. K. Bennett, from now on . . .

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