A heel without a heel, Aurélie Dupont’s pointe shoes, Usain Bolt’s spikes, a shoe imagined by David Lynch for Christian Louboutin… at Printemps Haussmann in Paris, more than 200 pieces tell the story of footwear as an object of desire, power, performance, and sometimes torture.
You can learn a lot about a civilisation by looking at its feet. What it chooses to put on them, how high it decides to perch them, the way it hides, distorts, protects or displays them. That is the premise of Step by Step, the new exhibition at Printemps Haussmann: forgetting for a moment the shoe as a mere accessory to consider everything it says about us.
Beneath the department store’s majestic dome, 800 square metres and more than 200 pieces from fashion houses, museums, private collections, the Printemps archives and ESMOD come together to form a curious collective wardrobe. The eleven chapters avoid the trap of the chronological, overly academic exhibition. Here, a Moroccan babouche or a traditional clog can enter into conversation with Balenciaga or Vivienne Westwood. And there are some very good reasons to stop and look… Vivienne Westwood’s vertiginous Super Elevated Gillies (Autumn/Winter 1993–94). Jean Paul Gaultier’s heelless boots. The pointe shoes worn by Aurélie Dupont in La Bayadère. Usain Bolt’s sprint spikes and those worn by Gabby Thomas at the Paris Olympics. Or the Ultima Lynch Ballerina, born in 2007 from a collaboration between Christian Louboutin and David Lynch: an object most definitely not designed for walking.
Maison Noritaka Tatehana ©Printemps
It is when Step by Step turns its attention to the body that the exhibition becomes most interesting. Impossible heels, pointed toes, XXL soles: shoes have long done more than simply dress the foot. They correct it, lengthen it, compress it, even altering the way the body holds itself. Protection on one side, seduction on the other; comfort collides with desire, anatomy with fantasy. The shoe may well be the only item of clothing for which suffering can still be considered a perfectly acceptable aesthetic argument.
Fetishism obviously had to make an appearance. Alaïa, Maison Ernest and Christian Louboutin come together amid leather, lacing, red, black and stilettos. The word itself comes from the Italian for dagger. Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton and David Lynch hover in the background: three men who perfectly understood that a shoe could tell us far more than just the story of a foot. More unexpectedly, the exhibition’s soundtrack reminds us that shoes can also be heard. Olivier Hazemann has composed a soundscape from recordings of footsteps, while Foley artist Claire André reveals some of cinema’s tricks: flour can be enough to create the convincing sound of a footstep in snow. The visitor moves from the shoe as object to the shoe in motion, then to the trace it leaves behind and, finally, to its sound.
And because shoes can also be downright strange, an entire section is devoted to transparency: from Cinderella to Kim Kardashian’s Yeezys, from glass to PVC, somewhere between fantasy, proudly questionable taste and the problem of condensation… The exhibition ends with a look at emerging talent, with ESMOD invited to reinvent the loafer. A fitting way to come full circle: after surveying everything humanity has invented to dress, transform or torment its feet, the next generation starts all over again, thankfully.
Azzedine Alaïa – Fondation Alaïa ©Printemps
Step by Step, The Shoe from Every Angle
Until 28 October 2026 at Printemps Haussmann, Women’s Building, 6th floor, 58 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris 9th
Free admission
Printemps — Step by Step exhibition