Charting shoe fashion from tight-laced Edwardian boots to the eccentric designer classics, with full-colour photography, this collection intends to appeals to the princess in every woman. It focuses on the major designers, their influences and their most famous clients on celebrities and their shoes including Elton John and Naomi Campbell.
Judith Henderson Miller began collecting in the 1960s while a student at Edinburgh University in Scotland. She had since extended and reinforced her knowledge through international research, becoming one of the world’s leading experts in the field. In 1979 she co-founded the best-selling Miller’s Antiques Price Guide and has since written more than 100 books, covering antiques, collectibles, architecture and interior design.
Judith was an expert on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, and had also appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and CNN. She was a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines, including Financial Times, The Telegraph, BBC Homes & Antiques and House & Garden. She lectured extensively, including at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Smithsonian in Washington. She died in April 2023
If you like shoes, this book is for you! A history over the past 100 years about shoes, and great pictures and quotes, and some history to go along with it! I used to wear heels every day, until a foot problem happened and now they are only for special occasions. I love heels, I will never forget my Grandma H. saying to me the night of my class reunion, "those are some busy shoes you have on." Yes, Grandma they were, they were three inch Anne Klein heels with oranges, pinks, and purples, I loved those shoes, they fit me perfectly and they were fun!
One of the great mysteries of life (to a man) is the feminine love, no feminine passion, for shoes. Why? we ask - and yet no truly satisfactory answer has ever been given to us.
But if you want to understand women it is as well to understand shoes and this little book is an elementary primer in the woman's shoe over the last hundred years or so - in effect, just 300 pages of pictures of shoes with a bit of background inbetween.
Still, I recommend it - for how else can a man understand the importance of Bally, Ferragamo, Gina, Schiaparelli, Jourdan & Vivier, Cardin, Cadabra, de Havilland, Saint Laurent, Caovilla, Westwood, Blahnik, Chanel, Gucci, Wenkert and Prada.
Perhaps the sheer tasteless lunacy of the 1970s might cause some of us to revolt but, on the other hand, there is real beauty in some of these shoes.
And there is a social history hidden in these pictures - from the days when a woman might be regarded as middle class if she had a full four pairs in an era of austerity through the power-dressing 1980s to the ostentation of the world before the credit crunch, shoes designed for dictator's mistresses.
This is really a little book for women by a woman but very occasionally a man will get a thrill when the shoes implies the woman who wears it. Not often but sometimes. Then there is a brief erotic frisson.
Those moments are interesting - they are always the simplest of shoes and boots, precisely not what most women want in their cupboard ... but then women do not wear shoes for men, they wear them for themselves and for other women ... and why not?
I LOVE this book! I just LOVE Shoes!! So this is the perfect book!!
Full of beautiful photos of the most amazing shoes, it also tells the history of shoes in fashion.
Among my favourites are 'The Neopolitan Icecream Shoe', the icecreams are carved in cork and covered with leather, also ' The All-Weather Shoes', a Rainbow wraps around the back of the foot and adds dramatic effect.
There are beautiful, elegant shoes throughout in a variety of colours, with quirky shoe quotations from famous people throughout the book. I just love this book.