Filming Shoes, Exploring Identity
In recent years the social scienceshave seen a marked growth of interest in video methods as a way to better understand the myriad, complex dimensions of mobile, spatial, sensory, emotional and embodied practices. This methodological development chimes with theoretical ‘turns’ towards mobilities, materiality, bodies and affect. Indeed, these are some of the themes at the heart of a study that takes shoes as its starting point to explore identity. In this project the consumption of shoes is seen as a social process that goes beyond the isolated act of purchase, reaching into cycles of use and re-use - the meaning of goods (and of fashion) is transformed through their incorporation into people’s everyday lives.
This paper illustrates the utility of video methods to explore these themes. As part of a multimodal qualitative approach, case study participants were video recorded in their homes going through and talking about their shoes. The video representations of these encounters tell different stories to those of the transcripts. We see the handling of the shoes, sense the visual and felt pleasure, disgust and ambivalence brought about by the aesthetics or dis/comfort of a particular pair. The emotional investment becomes evident through seeing the ways in which shoes embody key biographical moments and generate memories, thoughts and emotions about the self and others.
Participants were also filmed doing a range of activities, from clubbing to walking in the park. This mobile ‘go-along’ video method captures the function, form and display of shoes. We can see where and how shoes are worn; when materials and design let people down or become enabling; and how the shoes themselves create certain patterns and ways of walking and moving. Video invites empathetic engagements with the material, sensorial, experiencing body of the film and enables us to gain deeper insights into previously obscured aspects of social process, practiceand experience. Such an approach takes fashion studies beyond singular issues of design, production, representation and consumption, into the entanglement of these in relation to the ways in which fashion itemsare used, lived and transformed through everyday embodied practices.
Dr Rachel Dilley is a Research Associate in Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests centre on the sociology of the body, gender, identity, extreme sports, the environment and visual methods.Rachel is particularly interested in how new technologies can provide researchers with new ways of addressing theoretical and methodological challenges. She currently works on a 3 year ESRC funded project, ‘If the Shoe Fits: Footwear, Identity and Transition’.
Dilley, R. & Scraton, S. (2010), Women, Climbing and Serious Leisure. Leisure Studies, 29(2).
Brown, K., Dilley, R. & Marshall, K. (2008) Using Head-Mounted Video Camera to Understand Social Worlds and Experiences. Sociological Research Online, 13(6)