The Pink Shoe: Ornamentalism from Paris to Paris Hilton

Abstract

Restif de la Bretonne’s Le pied de Fanchette, ou le soulier couleur de rose constitutes the first documented instance of a foot (and shoe) fetish in French literary history. Apart from the evident allusion to Perrault’s Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de vair, the work is littered with references to the oriental tale that have previously been overlooked. I read Restif’s novella as a repurposing of the conte merveilleux, situated in the context of cloth merchants and the textile industry and predicated on commodity fetishism and ornamentalism. Restif preserves yet transforms the magical agents characteristic of the genre. While women are seemingly reduced to their overdetermined signifiers, the foot and the shoe, I argue that they are not only concealed but also constituted by the ornaments they wear, which both acquire and endow them with an agency shrouded in mystique that Anne Anlin Cheng terms “subject-as-object enchantment.” Restif first employs the term “fétiches sacrés” in reference to the queen’s foot. I trace the pink shoe from the streets of Paris to Paris Hilton’s closet in Sofia Coppola’s films Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring, invoking Cheng’s “logic of yellow femininity” as a contribution to a trans-historical, cross-cultural critique of consumer culture and account of “ornamental personhood.”