Feet

Queen Victoria of Britain would never refer to them, and anyway, at that time they were always carefully hidden under voluminous skirts. By contrast, in recent times a young red-headed bride who had only just fled from a palace of the very same royal court, reminded us of the eroticism of the foot, one of the most enduring fetishes. Chateaubriand’s refined, cultured and elegant friend Madame Récamier was shown lying languidly on a sofa wearing a diaphanous white dress, with bare feet. In the 1800s, a slightly bored and very mischievous young lady, wearing one of those house dresses in which she could receive friends, could, while lying in that same position, create an erotic charge by kicking first one and then the other slipper into the air, catching them mid-flight and slipping them back on to start the game over again. This seductive technique, which was recommended by the manuals for the art of pleasure of the time, would never have caught on with Chinese women, who until not so long ago would neither have wished nor been able to carry it out: their feet were tightly bound by bandages so that they would remain tiny and pretty to look at, but they remained hidden and never bared. Men and women agree on the appeal of the small foot, made even tinier by tightly fitting ankle boots, for most of the 1900s, with perhaps the only exception being the fascination for the large feet of Greta Garbo. This standard disappeared with the flat, masochistic shoes worn by the strapping young women at the end of the century: they must have bigger feet now than even the men had at the time of the crinoline. But, these days, deprived of all that blushing18^th century interest, bare feet are not even revealed by sandals (the latest fashions has them worn with socks), or gym shoes, or the Chinese slippers that are popular during summer months.