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Until the end of the 18th century, it was men who lavished attention on their feet. Louis XIV wore high heeled mules to show off his shapely legs; his courtiers adorned their figures and feet with feathers, pink silk, lace, and jewels; even in colonial American, men fussed with their wigs and the bows and buttons on their shoes. The end of that foppery, called "the great renunciation" by historians, coincided with an epochal shift in politics and society, toward democracy, industry, and reason, away from the aristocracy with its affectations that spoke of rank, parasitism and, to the modem eyes, effeminacy. Women’s fashion is now, some believe, at the turning point of similar magnitude, coinciding with the equally dramatic social transformation of the past several decades. The change has been slow: a century long move away from the padding, corseting, and decoration that made a woman into a kind of ornate bauble(小摆设) and displayed her family’s wealth, and toward the clean, sleek modern lines first introduced with the suffrage movement. But the shift has accelerated in recent years, thanks to changes in the technology and business of fashion. The use by top designers of "weird, fabulous, unrecognizable synthetics," says Hollander "has ruined the status of certain fabrics, like linen, which has had a leveling effect for the es and for’ the classes." And the emergence of chains like Club Monaco means that "forward looking style is disseminated very fast and very cheaply," according to Valerie Steele, a historian and curator of "Shoes: A Lexicon of Style," an exhibition now on view at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Such stores have succeeded, she believes, because "there’s substantial group of people with a sophisticated eye for design" who are eager for an affordable version of what was once thought to be "dog-whistle fashion," pitched so high that only a few would get it. Against that back-ground, the shoes at FIT look like fashion’s last gasp. The exhibit begins with the most symbolically loaded of women’s shoes: high heels, which Steele calls "a prime symbol of women’s ual power over men." That same defiance of feminine expectations is visible throughout the FIT show: in the boot, for instance, with its connotations of machismo and. military power, or the androgynous oxford, made girlisl with a big chunky heel. The show ends, fittingly, with the sneaker. No longer simply a downscale kid wear item, the big, brilliantly colored, high-tech sneaker has become one of the today’s most dramatic fashion statements, asserting street hip and futuristic velocity. Maybe shoes aren’t so indifferent to the changes in modem lives, after all.

Throughout last century, a woman adorned herself in an elaborate way to