Today marks the debut of a really fun feature on Fantastic Toe: our curated shoe exhibits.

Every once in a while, we will assemble and post an exhibit of noteworthy shoes in art, the movies, or other medium — sometimes from a bygone era, sometimes contemporary. We’ll post them under the member name “Curator”; you can always find the current exhibit by searching on that name from the Browse Collections interface.

Curator’s first exhibit, “Twist! Monkey! Frug! (Shoe Ads from the 1960s)“, is worth looking at not only for the shoes (which are really quite stunning — check out the Christian Diors and the Charles Jourdans in particular) but also because the beautifully photographed ads are themselves works of art, and the ad copy (from which our exhibit title is excerpted) very much reflects the era. 

For the most part, these are couture shoes — the ads ran in Vogue and similar magazines, here and in France, between 1965 and 1969 — so you won’t find any of what some might call the more outrageous shoes of the 1960s. Instead you’ll see lower heels, more muted colors, wonderfully simple lines. (Can’t you just picture Faye Dunaway wearing these in 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair?) Needless to say, these are not the shoes that marched on Washington.

One brand in the exhibit with an interesting back story is the venerable but now defunct I. Miller. Its founder and namesake, Israel Miller, who died in 1929, built several shoe stores in New York City; the flagship, located at 46th and Broadway and in operation through the 1970s, bore the inscription “The show folks’ shoe shop dedicated to beauty in footwear.” Even more wonderful, the exterior wall contained 4 sculpture niches, each of which housed a likeness of a prominent woman in the arts. What a branding strategy! The building is now in slight disrepair, but nonetheless it surely belongs on any shoe lover’s tour of New York City.

See how fun this is? Where else can you mix in a little architectural history with your shoe lust? Check out the exhibit, and check back soon for the next one.