Label for the exhibition Shoes: Pleasure and Pain
On Your Toes
With their slender high heels, these women’s shoes showed off the wearer’s tiny foot and shapely leg under the ankle-length dresses then fashionable. A partial wedge supported the span of the arch. Nonetheless, the thin satin-covered wooden heel would not take much weight and the wearer would have had to balance on her toes.
Black shoes
1770–89
France or Italy
Silk satin and leather
Given by Mrs Willoughby Hodgson
V&A: T.215&A-1916 [2015-2016]
Black satin shoe
French or Italian, 1770-1785
Museum no. T.215A-1916
Given by Mrs. Willoughby Hodgson [2007]