V&A Exhibition - Shoes: Pleasure & Pain

What crossed your mind before you put on your shoes this morning? Was it whether they would be comfortable and practical; induce a sense of power and prowess? Give you added height or simply that they went better with your outfit over another pair? Shoes: they have transformative qualities, we know that, and are endlessly mystified by it. Five years in the making, the  Victoria & albert Museum´s latest exhibition, Shoes: Pleasure & Pain, seeks to dissect that even further, bringing together a shoe shrine of examples (more than 250 pairs) of both historic and contemporary styles from across the world to explore our obsession.

"This obsession with shoes just really struck me, and how it's gone on. Through social media, it's in our living room. I wanted to go into why are we who we are in shoes? And so often they are not really made for our feet, which are actually quite wide. Fashion is a different thing," explains the exhibition's curator Helen Persson. Funnily enough, for someone curating a show about shoes, Persson's own collection is rather modest - she estimates about 40 and that includes practical shoes, not just the pretty ones, of which there are very many to be found here.

Spanning two floors (a jewel box-style surround carefully and cosily lit downstairs for all the fanciful creations and a bright and airy upstairs for the more pragmatic matters of the making aspect), the exhibition is broken down into categories, shoes grouped by "status" and "seduction". Among the line-up, you'll spot a simple pair of courts belonging to marilyn Monroe. "Her toe prints can still be seen inside," points our Persson. "There's something very intimate about that because it contains a piece of your body, rather like lingerie." She makes a good point.

Then there are "porn chic" shoes; and red diamond and sapphire shoes; "not for rainy day" and "sitting" shoes; those blue Vivienne Westwood platforms that caused Naomi Campbell to take a topple on the catwalk; designs by the Manolo Blahnik of his day, Jean-Louis François Pinet; as well as those belonging to the one woman who was responsible for bringing the aforementioned Blahnik's name to the masses: Carrie Bradshaw.

"Sex And The City  - it was in the papers, you couldn't avoid it. It became part of the vocabulary. It's been talked about so much that one could feel tired by it, but one should not underestimate it," says Persson for some of the no-brainer shoe inclusions and references in the exhibition. For example, the clip when Mr Big proposes with the famous blue bejewelled shoe is played as a pair of magic footprints appear on the stairs to lead you up to see how such creations can even be made. Because it's easy to forget that these beauties are clever feats of construction and engineering too. And it's here that one of Persson's favourite facts is revealed.

As far back as Ancient Greece and Rome the subject of platforms was being tackled. "The fashion was to wear really high platforms to be above everyone else and show off," she says - her discovery noticed in sculptures from the time of women doing just that. It wasn't, in fact, just about the gladiator sandal.

Perhaps most fun of all is the shoe wall of boxes at the end, complete with polaroids of styles from the permanent collection that didn't make the exhibition. It certainly does provide quite the inspiration when it comes to thinking about how one might want to store one's own shoe collection: basically just like this.

Shoes: Pleasure & Pain, sponsored by Clarks runs from June 13 to January 31 2016.