MFF IDEAS PROGRAM 2021 | VIRTUAL LECTURE (LIVE) | The Many Slippers of Cinderella with Hilary Davidson

Join Hilary Davidson as she presents her lecture The Many Slippers of Cinderella via Zoom. Please ensure you have downloaded and signed up to Zoom before the lecture begins https://zoom.us/

The lecture will begin promptly at 10:30am. Please ensure you are online before the start to allow admittance to the lecture. Lectures are not recorded and can only be viewed at the time listed on your ticket. Ticket sales will close at 9am on day of lecture, unless sold out prior.

**Link to Zoom meeting will be emailed prior to the lecture. Please see note on your ticket. If you have any concerns please email Kathleen at admin@johnstoncollection.org**

Cinderella’s glass slippers are the most famous magical shoes in Western culture. They emerged from the courtly fairy tales of Perrault in the seventeenth century and were stamped firmly into imaginations through Disney’s 1950 animated film. However, the story of a girl whose life is changed by shoes is much older and spans time and the globe, from ancient Egypt to medieval China, North America to Nigeria, the Brothers Grimm to Carrie Bradshaw. This talk explores some of the incredible variety of wondrous shoes in Cinderella-type stories, and how they have offered fantastical change as a reward for virtue. The transformative power of this potent symbolic footwear that exists only in the imagination has proven a continual source of inspiration for artists and fashion designers, modern-day pedlars of enchanted possibilities.

HILARY DAVIDSON trained as a bespoke shoemaker before becoming a dress historian and curator, and is now based between Sydney and London. She was curator of fashion and decorative arts at the Museum of London between 2007-2012 and has lectured and taught extensively across fashion history and theory, archaeology and curation. Her MA History of Textiles and Dress thesis was on the cultural power of red shoes and developed into several articles on magical footwear, including an essay for the V&A exhibition catalogue of Shoes: Pleasure and Pain (2015). Hilary is an honorary associate at the University of Sydney, on the editorial board of Fashion Studies, and in 2019 published Dress in the Age of Jane Austen (Yale University Press).

Image: Glass slippers, limited edition by Maison Martin Margiela, 2009