R Review From Scalp to Soles 111
Part of this experience is tribal, too. It is human nature to want
to express identity through a “look” and to enhance a sense of
belonging through dress.
I know a woman who is, as we say in the South, “too poor to
paint, too proud to whitewash.” (For Northern readers, that phrase
is applied to old-money Southerners who do not have any old or
new money, but they still have the house. They don’t want anyone
to know they don’t have any money, though, so they let the fence
rot rather than spruce it up with lime and water.) This woman tries
to identify herself through a “classic” look, even though she would
look a lot more presentable if put the put the moth-eaten “classics”
back in the steamer trunk and spent $100 at Wal-Mart. But to her,
“new” equals “bad.”
Watches and pens are extensions of body language, too. If you
have an expensive watch, and you aren’t on the Forbes 100 list,
you might use gestures and wear shirts and jackets that allow you
show off that $10,000 timepiece.
You can tell if someone is stuck in a period through things simi-
lar to this as well. A perfect example: Flower children wearing
organic cotton skirts still live in Berkeley, California, although in-
stead of being 20-something babes, they’re now 60-something
grandmothers.
Finally, why “every shoe tells a story” is not only a question to
be answered here, it is one tackled in National Geographic by
senior writer Cathy Newman. She quotes both designers and his-
torians in unequivocally pointing to the effect of shoes on body
language, the statements that shoes make about social status, and