Heels

Fashion and Contemporary Design Program 

From February 3rd to July 7th, 2024

“The work we have done is inspired by the beauty and irradiance of objects. By the infinite possibilities of human creativity: its secrets, its desires, its dreams, its materials.”

— Matter Matters Collection

The use of heels goes back to the Persian cavalrymen of the tenth century, among whom they were restricted to men. In the eleventh century, they migrated to Europe, still used with men’s footwear and associated with high social status. It was not until the nineteenth century that heels became a women’s fashion accessory. “Click-clack,” the sound produced by someone walking in high heels, is a rhythm that both beckons and overwhelms.

To exhibit an object with so powerful a symbolic charge requires the skill of a tightrope-walker, in order not to give way to tirades. Heels are impractical, uncomfortable, and virtually useless; they affect the posture of the person wearing them, by lengthening the legs, arching the back, and pushing out the chest. It is paradoxical that a decorative object manages at the same time to inhibit movement and to stylize the human figure in such a striking way. These characteristics make it possible for us to approach the heel as an object of desire with no utilitarian purpose. The exhibition Heels presents a selection of more than one hundred heels, categorized according to form, material, and concept, which constitute the structural axes of the collection.