determined to make his love of fetishism available to like-mind-
ed people – there were more like-minded people at
that time than one might at first think – and he published Bizarre first from New York and then
from Holly-
wood, from 1946 to 1959. Pro-
claimed a “great artist, [a] vision-
ary” and “the
Leonardo da Vinci of Fetish” by the renown Ameri-
can fetish photographer, Eric Kroll,12 stilettos
featured in most of the artwork, and what may be termed “proto-stiletto high heels” featured
in most of the photo-
graphy, in every issue of Bizarre.
A younger artist whose career overlapped with Willie’s was Eric Stanton (1926–99). Born
Ernest Stanzone in New York, Willie’s work was an influence on Stanton’s comic and illustration
art, although Stanton, unlike Willie, is mainly known for his focus on dominant women. They
wore stiletto heels, of course. And, although Caroline Cox des-
cribes Stanton’s creations as
“power-crazed women trampling on slave males”,13 many women in real life, apparently, were
app-
reciative: Stanton’s obituary in the British national broadsheet, The Independent, revealed
the following:
In 1984, the trendy New York club the Danceteria held the only
exhibition of [Stanton’s]
work to date. Four thousand fans turned up and made the event a res-
ounding success.
“Thirty-six women and four guys asked me to sign a catalogue,” Stanton proudly
boasted.14
But Willie and Stanton were not the only artists and photograph-
ers with a fetishistic passion
for the stiletto heel, and nor were they the first to express such passions in images and place
them in the public domain. Colin McDowell, in Shoes: Fashion and Fantasy, devotes a full page
to an erotically suggestive drawing de-
picting a hapless manservant cleaning the stiletto-heeled
boots of a crop-wielding dominatrix. The drawing, c.1930, pre-dates Willie by some fifteen
years; it is attrib-
uted to “‘Soulier’ (Paul Kamm)”. 15
Continuing in the tradition of “Soulier” and Stanton in partic-
ular, is the work of the British
fetish artist Sardax, whose imagery, in both black-and-white and colour, evoke often fantastic-
al
worlds of female domination. In his 2006 book, The Art of Sardax, stiletto-heeled shoes or
boots feature in thirty-eight out of forty-
one images in which women are depicted in
identifiable foot-
wear.16 Additionally, many of Sardax’s submissive men – all men in his work
are submissive –
are also depicted wearing stiletto heels.
Photography, a relatively new medium compared with drawing and painting, has already
estab-
lished a rich history of imagery in which high and stiletto heels make a significant
contribution to erotic scene-setting. Many fine, early examples of such imagery are to be found
in the collection of vintage fetish photography held by John and Linda DuPret, published in
2001 by the Erotic Print Society.17 Predominantly French in origin, the collection documents a
fascinating interest – and trade – in erotic, fetish and BDSM (bondage and domination/
sadomasochism) imagery dating from the 1880s.
The earliest of these photographs do not depict shoes with partic-
ularly high heels, although
shoes do, indeed, feature in many of them even when the models are not wearing much else.18
Higher heels appear in a shot by one of the few identifiable photograph-
ers, Biederer, in the
1900s.19 According to Linda DuPret, Biederer “was the first photo-
grapher to ‘formalise’ fetish
wear”, including shoes and boots, and “his contribution to the fetish clothing and imagery of
today is huge but largely unrealised”. Biederer’s work, the vast majority
of it from the 1920s,
is well rep-
resented in the collection. He “produced the most extreme of the fetish photographic
scenarios of the 20s”, and, among others, worked with fetish lingerie de-
signer Diana Slip.20
Some of the most stylised, professional and modern-looking images in the
see note †
collection are by Biederer, and some very high heels play their intended rôle.21
Images by another Frenchman, Yva Richard, and a German, Franz Rehfeld, as well as many by
an-
onymous photographers, also feature some very high heels – heels that were as close as the
1920s and, in some cases, the 1930s, could get to the thin,
