The Verticality of the Shoe or the Shoe as Pedestal. (EN)
Much could be written about the fetishism of the shoe. But it is that elevation of “the dressed” that interests me here. The concept of “nakedness” has long held a meaning in our Western culture of being “stripped.” It reveals a fragility: feeling naked before the world exposed your vulnerability and your intimacy (1). The shoe carries this reading of protecting the foot, of reinforcing our base. This is the aspect that concerns me and on which I will focus, in a sense of aesthetic-symbolic imagery and the representation of such an object. The shoe as pedestal embodies the tension between who we are and how we move forward. Verticality is not merely standing upright, but walking with purpose, on foundations that support us with affirmation. We are not fixed like statues. We rise as we advance. Our pedestal is not immobile; it “holds us in transit.”
The Verticality of the Shoe.
To address this idea, I first need to discuss what “the verticality of the shoe” might be.
In philosophical terms, “verticality” has been used to represent concepts such as:
Spiritual or moral elevation.
Integrity and rectitude.
The connection between the terrestrial (horizontal) and the transcendent (vertical).
Standing upright, the human being as a symbol of consciousness.
The shoe, for its part, can represent:
The relationship with the ground, with the earth, with the concrete.
Walking, the path, the journey.
Protection and the boundary between the body and the world it touches.
The instrument of stepping, of transit.
The shoe—an instrument of the low, of the earth—becomes vertical when the human being rises with dignity. It is not simply a functional object but part of the human gesture of elevating oneself. It is part of the posture of standing upright before the world.
From the perspective of “the aesthetics of posture,” verticality initially refers to “moral rectitude,” and the shoe, to the way we advance. Thus, it could be interpreted as: “Walking with verticality” = walking with integrity. Therefore, we might understand that “the verticality of the shoe is the symbol of walking upright, of stepping firmly in life, of the way our existence touches the ground without losing sight of the sky.”
The shoe, in its most immediate function, would be the “boundary between the body and the ground.” It marks the point where the human being touches the earth. But when we introduce the idea of verticality, the shoe ceases to be a mere support and becomes a “vector”: that which “initiates elevation.” Verticality implies transcendence, the impulse to rise above the horizontality of the animal world. The shoe, then, not only protects the foot: it “elevates the being,” straightening it toward the horizon.
The Shoe as Pedestal: A Body Upright in Transit.
Traditionally, a pedestal is what supports a statue. It has no value in itself, only in what it allows us to see, in what it elevates. But the shoe conforms to the body; it is a dynamic pedestal, “walking with us.” The shoe is a pedestal in motion.
The classical pedestal exposes: it puts something in view, it displays it. The shoe does the same, but integrated with us. This could be read as a metaphor for self-assertion or even vanity, but also as an expression of “dignity”: standing up, putting on shoes, is a way of occupying the vertical space of the world with awareness.
If we think of the shoe as a pedestal, we enter another dimension: the pedestal is what “supports what is worthy of being shown,” what “grants value” simply through the act of elevation.
Thus, the shod body acquires the character of a “sculpture in motion,” a kind of work moving on its own pedestal. (A note here: this idea of the shoe’s elevation has a symbolic-aesthetic rather than existential connotation. To call it a “sculpture in motion” may imply an artwork, which, in my view, the everyday object itself lacks. Ultimately, it is part of the human being moving by their own will. So we cannot understand it literally as a sculpture in motion; rather, it could be “the process of a work in motion” or “an element of a work.”)
Verticality as an Ethics of Presence.
At this point, I take Paul Valéry as a reference to approach the idea of the “verticality of the shoe as pedestal,” because in his poetics, body, gesture, and thought exist in a relationship of balance, a “tension between the physical and the ideal.”
The pedestal is no longer beneath a motionless figure: it moves, experiments, adjusts.
For Valéry, each step is, for example, an “act of temporal sculpture”: the body shapes its own position in space as an artist works the material.
The verticality of the shoe-pedestal implies that the way we walk is a way of being in the world. If the pedestal gives us height, the shoe gives us direction. And if we walk without awareness of the pedestal, we risk being lost in inertia or mere appearance.
From this, we may conclude that the shoe as pedestal embodies the tension between who we are and how we advance. Verticality is not only standing upright, but walking with purpose, on foundations that sustain us. In this idea, the notion of architecture also emerges.
In the union of verticality and pedestal, there is something especially Valérian: grace. Grace is not the absence of effort, but the “perfect management of invisible effort.”
The shoe, then, symbolizes this mediation: between the terrestrial and the aerial, between weight and form. Walking, in this sense, is an art of thought: thought sustained, advancing on its own ephemeral pedestal. In Valéry, the intelligence of the body (dance, stepping, posture) is thought incarnate.
For us, the shoe is not a mere accessory, but an “instrument for measuring the world”: it delineates the relationship between body and ground, between movement and gravity. Its verticality is an act of calculation: the body seeks, with each step, the balance between falling and rising. Thus, “the shoe is the compass point that gives balance to the dressed human.”
The shoe is the pedestal of the instant, the moving base of human form. In its verticality, grace is exercised: the intelligence of the body rising without forgetting the ground.
Note: In my next essay, after considering the shoe as verticality and pedestal, I will “take off my shoes” to address the “reconciliation with horizontality,” the return to the elemental.
(1). As Giorgio Agamben observes in Nudity (2009), our culture has constructed a symbolic distance between the natural and the dressed, between the naked and the supernatural. In this gesture, the exposed body ceases to be mere matter and becomes a sign: a manifestation of fragility, of vulnerability before the world. To undress, then, is not simply to remove a garment, but to shed a form of protection, revealing the threshold between the intimate and the visible. It is at this same threshold that the shoe can be situated. If nakedness reveals the fragility of the body, putting on shoes affirms it. The shoe, by covering the foot, does not hide so much as it supports; it does not deny exposure but structures it. Where the bare foot touches the ground, the shoe introduces a mediation: a way of being in the world without renouncing the ground that sustains us.
Agamben, Giorgio. Desnudez. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2009. ———. Nudities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
(2). Both Dant (1996) and Baudrillard (1968) provide tools for thinking of the shoe as a fetishized object: not merely functional, but loaded with meaning and symbolic value that exceeds its utility, functioning as a symbolic pedestal.
Dant, T. (1996). Fetishism and the social value of objects. Sociology, 30(2), 303‑321. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1996.tb00434.x
Baudrillard, J. (1968). The System of Objects. London: Verso.
(3). This book collects various essays by Valéry that allow the exploration of concepts such as aesthetic form, rhythm, grace, the body, and the relationship between the practical and the artistic.
Valéry, Paul. Teoría poética y estética. Spanish edition, Madrid: Visor, 2006.