The Summer Shoe of My Dreams

Or, what to wear to a Surrealist summer party.

Photo: ASOS

This has got to be the shoe of my dreams.

The Guardian have reported it as 'the sandal that sums up British summer' due to its (obvious) nod to the Twister ice cream. But there's definitely a bit more to it than that... There's something about a (woman's) shoe that pretends to be a delicious sweet treat that smacks of Surrealism to me...and then there's also the shape of the heel and its probably unintentional sexualisation.

Surprisingly, shoes don't seem to have quite the visible presence in Surrealism as I expected. As a stereotypical fetish item, I expected to find a lot more women's shoes, particularly in the artistic works more closely concerned with the subconscious and with Freudian psychoanalytic theories.

Despite not being able to find anything quite on point from my quick search through the archives, here's a couple from the canon: firstly, Breton's spoon (after cendrier cendrillon, the Cinderella ashtray in L'Amour Fou, published 1937) and second, Dali's shoe of 1931.

André Breton's large wooden spoon described in L'Amour Fou, exhibited in Le Surréalisme et l’Objet (2013-14), Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo: Will Atkin

Salvador Dali, Scatalogical Object Functioning Symbolically (The Surrealist Shoe), 1931. Photo: flickr


If it wasn't out of stock, you could buy the ASOS shoe here.