Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
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Customer Review
Fantastic & informative! High price of fashion and status...
For centuries in China women tottered wearing tiny silk shoes. In "Every Step a Lotus," Dorothy Ko describes the obscure Chinese custom of footbinding. Every culture has different forms of unusual, sometimes unpleasant, rituals. In pre-1949 China petite feet symbolized beauty, status and honor. A woman's face and personality became secondary to tiny feet adorned with exquisite shoes.Chinese women were revered for their textile artistry and took enormous pride in creating their own shoes, sitting together for days chatting and sewing decorative embroidery on ravishing silk. Lotus shoes told stories with intricate needlework reflecting hopes and dreams of a better life.Ko's well-researched exposé and graceful prose details a custom that was the outcome of living in a male dominated Confucian culture. Ko includes over one hundred illustrations of exquisite antique lotus shoes from different regions during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Most of the spectacular shoes, from the...
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another beautiful volume
This is another visually lovely book. I really enjoyed the breakdown and historical information presented. Very good resource for pics and data.
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Product Description
Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance their grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear. This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice--the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures.
Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before. Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imaginations.
A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum
One of The Best
For anyone interested in Chinese culture and its past, this is one of the best books I have seen to introduce the reader to the subject of Bound Feet. The idea of foot-binding was an erotic, as well as economic one, and this book not only explains why the binding was done but also how, in some detail. The photos of shoes that were produced to be worn by the women who were subjected to his practice are excellent and the book, as a whole, is most interesting. Please note - this is not an in-depth study of the subject of foot-binding; rather the major amount of detail is in regard to the shoes.For a more detailed look at foot-binding as a custom, please go to your favorite search engine and pull up Chinese Foot Binding.(The author of this review is an author herself, as well as a professional photographer, and has been interested, in depth, in Chinese culture for over 40 years).
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its good
