traum. - nachts in einem laubwald gegangen, undeutlich gewusst, dass ich mich in afrika befand, eine hyäne kreuzte meinen weg, sprang mich an, verbiss sich in meiner goldenen pulsuhr, ich schleuderte die hyäne von mir, schlug mit dem arm aufs laken, wachte davon auf, war bestürzt.
Es war einmal ein Kind eigensinnig und tat nicht, was seine Mutter haben wollte. Darum hatte der liebe Gott kein Wohlgefallen an ihm und ließ es krank werden, und kein Arzt konnte ihm helfen, und in kurzem lag es auf dem Totenbettchen. Als es nun ins Grab versenkt und die Erde über es hingedeckt war, so kam auf einmal sein Ärmchen wieder hervor und reichte in die Höhe, und wenn sie es hineinlegten und frische Erde darüber taten, so half das nicht, und das Ärmchen kam immer wieder heraus. Da mußte die Mutter selbst zum Grabe gehen und mit der Rute aufs Ärmchen schlagen, und wie sie das getan hatte, zog es sich hinein, und das Kind hatte nun erst Ruhe unter der Erde.brüder grimm: das eigensinnige kind.
emma landford
[... and you're not ... and I got it ... and you not ...]
herr kleber macht mich krank, krank, krank. ich möchte ihn gerade rücken, gerade rücken, gerade rücken. und das macht mich krank, krank, krank.
diese schübe im gym. nach neujahr, montags, kekse und fleischhunger abarbeiten. jetzt gerade: sommerpanik vermutlich, lauter stepperinnen, schuften für den strand, gegen den pareo. vor zwei wochen: "bikini kannst du nicht aufs cover schreiben, bikini ist ein trauma". bei maggi jetzt die kohlsuppen-kollektion. mcdonalds: hat einen mr. rocket als chefkoch angeheuert, überall rauke rein, terence conran-style in london, ultrawhite-fotos von sex&thecity-mimikry-frauen in den schaufenstern, albern. fanta: mid calorie range. übrigens: blutorange, bitter. frage mich, ob das etwas medizinales hat.
The New York Times July 13, 1982
NO HALFWAY MEASURES FOR SKIRT LENGTHS THIS SUMMER By John Duka
[...]
In fact, a check of New York streets last week and during the weekend showed that fashionable women are evenly divided between long and short hemlines.
High hemlines were achieved in any number of ways. While some women wore standard flounced or pleated full miniskirts with cotton sweaters and sweatshirts, the truly chic wore slim knit minidresses or long sweaters that skimmed just above the knees. The accessories to wear with these? Most women chose low-cut flat shoes that show a bit of toe, known as cleavage in the shoe business. Some wore knee socks. But the most popular accessory seemed to be a cassette recorder with headphones.
[...]
Los Angeles Times April 4, 1986
SPRING CONSENSUS ABOUT SHOES: FLATS ARE SHARP By DIANE REISCHEL
Spring '86 may be the season the humble flat shoe gains some fetishists of its own.
Traditionally the dull sister of the sexy spike heel, this sensible schoolmarm of footwear has finally outgrown its plain pallor.
[...]
If the eye is adjusting to new roles for flats, it's because the flats themselves are changing. "So often flats look like men's shoes, but I felt this year there was so much pretty detailing -- silver studs and soft, glove leathers -- instead of the thicker leathers," says Tom Voltin, women's footwear manager at Saks Fifth Avenue. Cole Haan and Anne Klein are basics of the flats collection at Saks, Voltin says.
Among spring's most sophisticated flats are the skimmer -- a simple, low-vamp flat with a narrow wedge of a heel. It's a shoe with "toe cleavage," as they say in the industry. The two-tone spectator flat -- from such designers as Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren -- also is making a nostalgic comeback.
[...]
The Times (London) May 4, 2001
Show your toes to the world Jack Malvern
This summer, focus on the cleavage at the end of your foot
There is one problem with cleavage. Never mind its vulgarity. Forgive its indecency. An evening spent flaunting a mighty crevasse is seldom an evening wasted. No, the problem with cleavage is that it is finite.
The human body is simply not engineered to fulfil our demand for shadowy contours. Industries have grown up around enhancing bust size: surgery, make-up, trusses that would make Isambard Kingdom Brunel claw at his feathery beard in wonder. A plunging neckline can never, on a youthful figure at least, tumble too far. Even when frontal possibilities seem exhausted, fashion will find another crevice in which to create ever-deeper fissures. Alexander McQueen's bumster trousers caught on before you could say Bob the Builder.
But a year after the bumster, the chic voyeur is calling for more. Bump into Liz Hurley this summer and your eyes will be dragged inexorably to her feet. She won't be wearing that dress or those trousers. It's those shoes. Toe cleavages, not the eyes, are the window to the sole.
There is more to provocative footwear than simple nudity. My chemistry teacher wore sandals the year round, teasing off his socks when the weather warmed enough to expose his ill-kempt bunions. A better role model is Jerry Hall. Her feet go on almost as far as her legs, and during her stint as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate she would tell anyone who would listen: "Ah definitely believe in toe cleavage".
[...]
As for men, when I don my sandals this summer, I expect catcalls and whistles the length of the high street.
[...]
DAILY MAIL (London) May 15, 2001
So are toes the NEW CLEAVAGE? Imogen Edwards-Jones
THIS HAS to be one of the most welcome fashion trends to teeter its way up the High Street in years. While the majority of the female population find their curves are too prominent to embrace most fashions, showing off your toes makes sexy shoes a must-have this summer.
As if to underline the point, Cherie Blair stepped out this week in what was for her an astonishingly risque pair of sandals, which left little to the imagination about the quality of her pedicure. On this page we feature the famous and their fabulous footwear - can you match the celebrities with their sandals?
Meanwhile, every girl who wants to boost her sex appeal should be investing in shoes to show off manicured, tanned and beautified toes that are the modern-day equivalent of the cleavage.
[...]
DAILY MAIL (London) December 16, 2002
THINK YOURSELF THIN; The cheat's guide to looking party-season slim without shedding a single ounce
[...]
4 AVOID running in crowded places. Fast moving, wobbling flesh looks unattractive, says body language expert Judi James. Make sure you avoid dashing across a crowded room to greet people. Instead, walk as sedately and graciously as you possibly can.
[...]
7 CHOOSE long-toed shoes which elongate the line of your legs, according to Victoria Nixon, author of Supermodels' Beauty Secrets. Showing some toe cleavage - where the front of your shoes is cut low enough to reveal the beginning of your toes - also looks sexy and slimming. High heels alter your posture, forcing your hips to sway as you walk, giving the impression of being more feminine and less bulky.
[...]
13 IF you've got large legs, never wear shoes with ankle straps because they effectively cut legs in two, making them look stumpier. Also avoid shiny tights, whether flesh-coloured or black opaque, which can make big legs look like sausages.
[...]
Sunday Times (London) March 23, 2003
Vanessa Wilde's secret diary Vanessa Wilde
[...]
Apparently, the nerves to the toes are very close to the nerves to the testicles. I suppose the same thing must be true of women - well, you know what I mean.
Anyway, that explains the total mystery of why men think toes are so amazingly sexy and are so obsessed with sucking them when, usually, they're revolting. And that's why it's so desperately important to keep your toes in a state to be sucked, as well as a state to be seen in suck-me sandals with teasing toe cleavage - unlike most Englishwomen, whose feet look like a health hazard waiting to happen.
Besides, your toes and your face are the only things you can't camouflage when it really comes down to it - in the bedroom or whatever. I mean, you can drape your whole body in flowing garments but you can't hide your face, and there comes a moment in every woman's life - quite often with any luck - when she has to remove her tights and expose her naked feet.
I just can't understand why most men aren't put off there and then, forever.
I mean, I've seen some of Britain's top actresses barefoot on stage, from the front seats, and I'm still reeling. Bunions, hard skin and dirty toenails! Can you believe it? And they obviously think it's normal - they weren't playing peasants or anything. It's not surprising they can't hang onto their dreadful husbands and lovers and have to devote themselves to art instead. What is the point of being famous if you have filthy feet?
[...]
The New York Times June 17, 2003
Curb Appeal: Seduction From the Ground Up By GUY TREBAY
She ravished his eye with her sandals. Honestly, that's what the Bible says. In Bethulia, an ancient Jewish city besieged by the army of Nebuchadnezzar, a widow of bravery and beauty took it upon herself to enter the enemy camp. According to legend, the widow, Judith, entered the tent of Holofernes, the general who led the invasion, and then, aided by maidservant and some lovely footwear, she managed to lop off his head.
For centuries, this deliriously gory narrative has provided subject matter for artists from Artemisia Gentileschi to Cindy Sherman, as well as meat for scholars, who dissect and analyze Judith's tale for its protofeminist import. The fact is, however, that hardly anyone beyond the poets who wrote the Apocrypha ever mentions the pivotal role played by Judith's footwear. How can that be? What is it about the bared foot that, even today, has the power to turn otherwise sensible people into prudes? Why is it a virtual secret that nearly a quarter of the footwear sold in the United States last year was sandals? What, one wonders, are the mystifying properties of the naked foot.
"Feet are and have always been a very sexual part of the body," said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and the author of "Shoes: A Lexicon of Style" (Rizzoli, 1999). "The foot is a surrogate for other parts of the body," said Ms. Steele, who would not be the first to note the amount of toe cleavage pounding the streets. [...]
"In the fashion world, sandals are more of a trend than ever," said Marshal Cohen, a retail industry analyst with the NPD Group, a market research firm.
[...]
"I wear sandals from the first minute it gets warm and I can get a pedicure," said one young woman, a public relations specialist who was sunning herself in Bryant Park yesterday afternoon. The pink varnish on her toes set off a pair of darker pink Sergio Rossi sandals. "I have pretty toes, for one thing," explained this woman, who preferred to stay nameless in print. "But I also love the freedom. And I hate, hate, hate it when my feet feel like they're in jail."
There was a time when "the pump was the biggest business there was" in footwear said Ellen Campuzano, the publisher of Fashion Facts Folio, a newsletter that tracks accessory trends. There was a time when "a slide was considered a sexy shoe, when toe cleavage was forbidden in the office," Ms. Campuzano added, and when sandals were as welcome at work as decolletage. "That has all changed drastically."
It has changed so fundamentally that flip-flops are now not only the largest selling shoe style in the developing world, but among the biggest fashion items on the globe. (When Havaianas flip-flops from Brazil were introduced last year on the West Coast, one distributor sold 100,000 pairs.)
"Flip-flops are just another staple in the footwear wardrobe now," Ms. Campuzano said. That they are also the antithesis of constrictive shoes like stilettos cannot be incidental to their appeal. Stilettos, for all their glamour, tend to pitch women into abnormal postures, forcing them to walk with mincing steps. In sandals, people of either sex glide along with a confident ease that the English poet and social reformer, Edward Carpenter, referred to as "the liberatory effect."
Carpenter always wore sandals in public, a habit as strange in his day as it is would be unremarkable in our own. Until the turn of the 20th century, "the last thing a woman would want to do is put her foot on display," said Mary Trasko, the author of the shoe history "Heavenly Soles" (Abbeville Press, 1992). Women, of course, were not alone in that. "Everybody kept their feet covered" out of modesty, Ms. Trasko said. And showing feet remained taboo until the 1920's, when footwear started to open up. The low-sided D'Orsay pump, named for a continental dandy, found favor in those heady years, as did the fisherman's espadrille, which Chanel promoted as one of the games she enjoyed playing with traditional markers of class.
"The only time when sandals were worn by aristocrats and commoners alike," Ms. Trasko said, was in the ancient world.
Ms. Steele of F.I.T. added, "If you were barefoot you were a worker."
But sandals don't signify class anymore. "They're worn by all types, all year around," said Elizabeth Lata, at whose spa on Lexington Avenue both society women and office workers soak their corns. "Before, it was only rich women getting pedicures," explained Ms. Lata, who opened her shop on the Upper East Side 12 years ago. "Now, it's all kinds of people, even kids," who are looking for methods to improve their curb appeal.
[...]
The foot, said Mr. Cohen of NPD, is a "sensual tool, and marketers have really recognized the psychology of that." They have also recognized that while, as the writer Holly Brubach once observed, "new shoes can't cure a broken heart, a tension headache, or iron-poor tired blood," they can temporarily relieve the symptoms. As it happens, this is no less true when the shoes in question amount to scraps of leather or cloth in search of a reason to delight, provoke or seduce.
National Post (Canada) December 18, 2003
Hobbled by vanity: For the sake of 'toe cleavage,' women are risking permanent disability, warn podiatrists who are treating more and more cases of cosmetic foot surgery gone wrong Gardiner Harris
Days after her daughter's engagement a year ago, Sheree Reese went to her doctor and said she would do almost anything to wear stilettos again.
"I was not going to walk down the aisle in sneakers," said Reese, a 60-year-old professor of speech pathology at Kean University in Union, N.J. She had been forced to give up wearing her collection of high-end, high-heeled shoes because they caused searing pain.
So Reese, like a growing number of American women, put her foot under the knife. The objective was to remove a bunion, a swelling of the big-toe joint, but the results were disastrous. "The pain spread to my other toes and never went away," she said. "Suddenly, I couldn't walk in anything. My foot, metaphorically, died."
With vanity always in fashion and shoes reaching iconic cultural status, women are having parts of their toes lopped off to fit into the latest Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Cheerful how-to stories about these operations have appeared in women's magazines and major newspapers and on television news programs.
But the stories rarely note the perils of the procedures. For the sake of better "toe cleavage," as it is known to the fashion-conscious, women are risking permanent disability, according to many orthopedists and podiatrists.
[...]
But advocates for the procedures say critics simply do not understand the importance of high heels. "Some of these women invest more in their shoes than they do in the stock market," said Dr. Suzanne M. Levine, an Upper East Side podiatrist who is widely quoted in women's magazines and has appeared on network television promoting the procedures.
"Take your average woman and give her heels instead of flats, and she'll suddenly get whistles on the street," she said. "I do everything I can to get them back into their shoes."
[...]
Levine and her partner, Dr. Everett Lautin, said critics do not understand that when doctors tell their patients not to wear high heels, patients do so anyway. "People say, 'Why do toe surgery if they work just fine?' " Lautin said. "Well, 'Why do a nose job when your nose is working just fine?' It's the same thing. People want to look their best."
The answer, Positano said, is that "you don't walk on your face."
Mail on Sunday (London) February 22, 2004
Our essential style clinic
SANDALS . They are meant to be relaxed, casual and carefree, so don't go matching colours.
- Bright-coloured sandals make a neutral outfit special and are ideal for dealing with floral prints.
- When only a neutral will do, try something reptilian. It has the edge over beige or khaki or nude.
- White is not a neutral colour in shoes. It's a statement.
- An open, high-heeled sandal with conservative work clothes looks sharp and serious. Flat, open sandals in the workplace say 'beach' not 'boardroom'.
- Toe cleavage is the key to a gorgeous sandal. Decide how much you want to show (should the band cross your toes, sit just above them, or at mid-arch) and stick with it.
The crowd of physicians, psychologists, nurses and English professors had come to participate in a conference on what is called ''narrative medicine,"NYT Magazine > Melanie Thernstrom: The Writing Cure