Shoes have always been more than just a practical necessity. They reveal the culture of the times in which they were worn the sexual morals, the social power play, as well as the endless shifting of fashion. Rebecca Shawcross takes the reader on a fascinating journey packed with social and historical detail of making and wearing, of the spectacular and the everyday, of conforming and rebelling.

Lavishly illustrated with a dazzling array of shoes from all over the world, Shoes: An Illustrated History tells the extraordinary story of this ultimate object of desire, from antiquity to the present.