The Semiotics of Shoes.

From an article in this Sunday’s NY Times (I know, I know; I need to expand my source list):

They are not just any sandals, but boxy buckled Birkenstocks, the footwear that has become synonymous with a certain type of noodge. Or in the senator’s case, worse. In his rabid desire for citizens never to inhale, he is portrayed in the satiric movie as mercilessly berating an employee, manipulating consumer sympathies and seeking to slap a skull and crossbones on every package of cigarettes in the land.

“Nothing says, ‘I want to tell you how to live your life’ more than Birkenstocks,” said Jason Reitman, the director of the film, which is to open in New York, Los Angeles and Washington on Friday. “The visual registers immediately. There’s something about the shoe that is universally understood that makes it so funny.” The sandals are emblems of liberal do-gooderness, he said, and the senator — a villain in the movie — wants to “regulate the world.”

Interpretant, interpretamen. Could this be why women crave shoes? Why we need different styles on our feet depending what mood we’re in or what we want to say to the world about ourselves at a particular given moment? I’m intrigued. Methinks you could almost do an entire thesis on the semiotics of shoes.

I want the ones pictured, by the way. They were big in Rome when I was there last summer….