signs of fashion
safety tabi shoes as seen on ping mag
Signs are often context-sensitive, means they have a certain meaning only in certain contexts.
In my last posts (see e.g. here) I was speaking about the nature of garment acting as a sign or also as a symbol or icon. Here the context of a sign can imply very different meanings -even just for shoes.
The architectural and the math building of the TU Berlin are right next to each other and it is easy to tell, who is coming from where – black existentialist clothes means architect, Birkenstocksandals means mathematician.
…and certain fashionistas sometimes like to slacken such conventions by combining dark existentialist clothes with let’s say…white and blue sneakers :)
However since the asian culture is again gaining influence in western Europe, it may be useful to study eastern shoe forms. And yes – it may be time to replace the blue and white sneakers with aboves cool Tabi shoes, which exist also in gold and silver as can be seen in the great overview on ping mag. If my currency converter was right they probably cost only about 30 Euro – so not too much for a trial… if you travel to Tokyo soon anyways.
However beware the context: – on a trip to China I bought me shouting neon-red sweatshirts and pants until finally a chinese woman took me aside to tell me that I was running around in chinese male underwear…
* don’t forget to buy socks as well.
** I wonder how the Tabi tags (signs) of this scary RFID-to-cell-phone-service in dress rooms at Mitsukoshi look like… (metasigns so to say :) ). (do they sell Tabi at Mitsukoshi?)
** A more female shoe form (?) are may be japanese geta, which have already a berlinized analog.
January 16th, 2014 at 9:17 am
how much us and do you have size eleven