Stop. Shoes, emotional attachment and affects of wearing. Sampson E.

Docoused and imperfect clothing items are often on the periphery of fashion and therefore find themselves out of sight of its researchers. Meanwhile, most of our interactions with clothing consists precisely in its wearing. Having chosen shoes as an object of his study, Ellen Sampson resorts to various scientific methods (from phenomenology and anthropology to psychoanalysis, philosophy and art history) in order to tell about the living nature of relations between shoes and its owner.

The author analyzes the affective and mnemonic mechanisms associated with shoes, demonstrating how the traces left on it embody human experience. A separate feature of the book is excerpts from the diary preceding each chapter. This diary reflects the experiment conducted by Sampson: she created her own shoes, to disregard it, conceptualizing her own sensations and changes in her condition associated with the practice of wearing.

Ellen Sampson - curator, researcher, senior researcher at the Northumbril University Design School