Furry Ankle Boots
(1943 - now)
Sometimes it is possible to achieve a luxurious high-fashion look with a make-do approach. These ankle boots were commissioned during World War Two by a well-to-do Londoner who took a mink stole and two coats – one made of red leather, the other from ocelot fur – to her local shoemaker in Kensington, and asked him to turn them into a new pair of shoes. The eye-catching results stood out in a period of wartime rationing. «They are a bit too flashy, a bit too high,» says Helen Persson, who has curated Shoes: Pleasure and Pain. «But I think that’s the most wonderful story: that in the middle of war it was still important to have something beautiful and new – so she came up with the idea of sacrificing her clothes. If I could take away any pair of shoes in the exhibition, it would be these.»