It’s the social trend, even a sub culture, that the sociologists have yet to acknowledge: the rise of Polish White Boots Girrrl.
I don’t know which web site you click to first thing – your favourite news site, game site, social networking site, porn site, horoscope site, gambling site, the beatroot...but me – I click to the site that is not just a sartorial chronicle, but an observer of social trends in Poland.
The site tracks photographically (mostly on dodgy mobile phone cameras) a spectacle that stalks, almost literally, our not so green and pleasant Polish land.
You know and love blondynka, the dumb Polish dyed blond equivalent of Essex Girl in the UK – and how we laughed at all those jokes. ‘What do you call an Essex Girl with half a brain? Gifted!’
How we did. Indeed. Chuckle
Well now let me introduce you to White Boots Girl.
She can appear anywhere – but her favourite place is at the shopping mall. White Boots Girl can be spotted, of course, because of her conspicuous white boots and her conspicuous love of consumption. The boots are usually accompanied by the same, chemical looking orange skin - the result, maybe, of either a daily roasting at the solarium, or, perhaps, from the leftover bottles of blonde hair dye...
Since I found this site I notice White Boots Girl everywhere. When I see a pair walking down the street the sound track I hear in my head is usually by Disco Polo Queen Shazza.
Soon, as her numbers grow, we will hear the same jokes about White Boot Girl as we used to endure about Blondynka, or Essex Girl.
What unites Essex Girl, Blondynka and White Boots Girl is that they are usually not the best educated, but have a little money – and man, are they going to show you they spend it.
And I think that’s good. It means money is starting to liberate poorer Poles. The reason why we laugh at White Boots Girl is because we want to maintain our superiority over them. Those working class oiks, chavs, rednecks, who dare to dangle their cash in front of our faces.
How uncouth.
But to me that is just another reason to lerve White Boots Girl. See the site (updated daily) of which I speak here. It will change your surfing habits forever.
Where's the website for the ol' Polish purple hair lady?
ReplyDeleteThe picture on top (in purple) looks like it wasn't taken in Poland but in Czech or Slovakia (the accent over the a gives it away).
ReplyDeleteAnd taking the cue for blonde jokes, I'll just mention the punchlines of some (assuming those will remind readers of the rest of the joke):
ReplyDeleteShe peels donuts.
"Move over girls, I've gotta gargle."
"Oh no, not the breathalyser again!"
She wanted to make more ice cream than Algida. (loses something in the translation)
"Thanks for the refill."
The same way minks do.
(bow, bow) Thank you, thank you, you've been a wonderful audience.
The picture on top (in purple) looks like it wasn't taken in Poland but in Czech or Slovakia (the accent over the a gives it away).
ReplyDeleteIt's an international movement. There are some phtos taken in the UK too. But it is a POlish site, set up by a guy in Warsaw.
Fair enough. I hadn't noticed this particular phenomenon and all things considered I look back on that innocent state with a certain amoung of nostalgia.
ReplyDeletePolish purple hair lady.
ReplyDeleteI found the first photo of no doubt many to follow:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/star_gazer_32/2124201072/
When I lived in Czestochowa the rage was white trousers.
ReplyDeleteThey're called "fuck-me-boots" and if they're white it's white fuck-me-boots ;)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck+me+boots
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck+me+boots
ReplyDeletehmmm... Nice discovery!
ReplyDeleteIn the seventies, the fashion in the US polka scene was white belts and white shoes, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd that was the guys.
For real.
There is an Amy Winehouse song (on first album, Frank) called Fuck Me Pumps...is this a related phenomenumumumum?
ReplyDeleteGeez - maybe I should start up Purple Haired Babcia web page?
I know I'd favorite it if'n you did. There's gotta be a ton of 'em in Warsaw, no? The most I ever saw was in Zakopane a few years back. It was like a convention of 'em. I was amazed. What's the deal? Don't they notice it's that color? Do they think it's silver grey or something?
ReplyDeleteLooking for white belt/shoe photos, I came across the following really, really cool album covers webpage. Was disco polo early enuff to have album covers or was it mostly a cassette phenonemon?
for album covers click here
Cassettes. Exclusive, I think.
ReplyDeleteGorgeous covers though, and now you have made me nostalgic. How can you have an album cover with an MP3? How do hippies roll joints on an MP3? Eh? Eh?
If my memory serves me right, "fuck-me-shoes" became a vernacular in the late seventies/early eighties with the advent of 5-inch stiletto heels.
ReplyDeleteAlbum covers-wise, make sure you check out the category on the website titled "Crazy Xtians." I split a gut laughing.
ReplyDeleteWith no classes and an errand to run on the other side of town I did a rare thing for me, I stopped in two separate shopping centers (plaza and pestka in poznan).
ReplyDeleteHappily, no white boots in sight. On the streetcar home I did see a woman in her 20's who wouldn't have looked out of place in Chicago in 1933. Pseudo-pseude jacket with fakefure trim, brown knee high boots and a floopy hat pulled down to her ears. But that's one of these perpetal never quite in (or out of) fashion "looks" in Poznan (along with the gypsy skirt, boots, scarf and long split endz hair) or in the winter a big fur coat and a perpetual look somewhere between disdain and rigor mortis (reserved for women over 50).
I don't see how white fuck me boots are indicative of "liberation." Seems closer to enslavement to materialism to me.
ReplyDeleteI must say that 'fuck me boots' represent a horrible degradation of the language:
ReplyDeleteThe correct term is 'fuck me heels'. And refers to any female footware with a high enough heel.
High heels create a look that mimics sexual excitement in females (as did footbinding in China, from the front bound feet and high heels are indistinguishable). Flat or low heeled boots are not the same thing at all.
High heels create a look that mimics sexual excitement in females
ReplyDeleteNow you completly lost me....????
And 'fuck me pumps' is the correct expression.
And Geez, 'liberation' means that they have greater disposal income, a prerequisite to liberation of all kinds...
Oh, so liberation boils down to having enough money to piss it away on crappy fashion even though the money could be better and more responsibly spent.
ReplyDeleteLiberation entails values transcending those that are merely monentary (and momentary).
Don't they teach people anything in school anymore?
ReplyDelete"Extreme high heels can be an object of sexual desire in themselves. They change the posture of the wearer and lengthen the legs, emphasising the calf muscles. ... Feet point during orgasm, and high heels mimic this .... the entire body is restricted in such high heels, meaning that the wearer can be considered to be in the power of her partner, as running away is impossible."
www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3724977
or:
"Stilettos require constant balance from the upper leg, causing the muscles of the backside to tense and appear pert and ready for mating" from the movie 'Kinky boots'.
Gee, and I thought it was because they thrust the pelvic area forward (in addition to tightening the asscheeks).
ReplyDeleteBlimey! Is this the reason for heel fetish? Never thought about this...until now...
ReplyDeleteWhite boots, to go back to the other point, are a sign of surplus in the economy and real people's living standards improving. I know the western middle class have become so degenerate that they forget these things, but material basis of society is vital to developing countries such as this one. And being freed from poverty is a liberation. A great liberation.
I drink to white boots and their fetish connotations! Salute and happy easter!
People in poverty still spend money on things they are led to believe they need but don't and actually contribute to keeping them impoverished. And I recall seeing more than a few fuck me heels of all varieties being worn on the streets in cities in Communist Poland, prolly even more so than in the US. Liberation from poverty just doesn't have all that much to do with fashion.
ReplyDeleteI'm talkin semiotics.
ReplyDelete:-)
In the intertextual or intersexual sense?
ReplyDeleteIn any event, consider Umberto Eco's definition of semiotics built upon our capacity to represent the world in any way we desire through signs, even in misleading and deceitful ways.
I stole that stuff from somewhere off some webpage.
One more thing about the sexual signalling of high heels.
ReplyDeleteA similar aesthetic was probably responsible for foot binding in China
http://presurfer.blogspot.com/2007/05/chinese-foot-binding.html
Apparently these 'lotus feet' were perceived as being extremely erotic by Chinese men (while they were in their lotus shoes the actual naked bound foot was a major turn off.
Maybe it started as an aesthetic in China -- but was it continued as such or did it become more so another means of making women even more dependent upon and subservient to men?
ReplyDeleteIn any event, it was only a practice among the upper classes. Peasant women needed working feet so theirs were never bound.
According to the wiki article, "the erotic effect was a function of the lotus gait, the tiny steps and swaying walk of a woman whose feet had been bound makes the men think that the women are sexy. The very fact that the bound foot was concealed from men's eyes was, in and of itself, sexually suggestive."
According to the anthropologist Francis LK Hsu (author of chinese and americans, among other cool books) the persistence of foot binding was more cultural inertia than anything else. There's actually a fair amount of evidence that many people didn't like the look of bound feet (clad or not) but that people continued to do it because ... they always had.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, when I saw a documentary on the last remaining women (now all elderly) with bound feet I was struck at the similarity between the side profile of the foot and high heels.
Also notice the extreme toe point of "lotus shoes" and the extreme points of womens shoes in recent years ... what's _that_ about????
ReplyDeletewinklepickers
ReplyDeleteI actually had the Hsu book (still have it) as required reading for a Chinese history course waaaay back when.
ReplyDeleteBut I dunno if his explanation is altogether correct. Certainly there was a lot of inertia in a tradition bound Confucian society. But there were for sure other underpinnings that kept the practice static. A combination of liking women who waddle just so and that making 'em dependent and subservient.
And I remember for a short time back in the late sixties that guys wore pointy shoes, too. At least the N'orks did (New Yorkers -- hoods -- fancy shirts and high collars, black leather jackets-- antithesis of hippie clothes). Those shoes had some kinda nickname about killing some kinda bugs in corners but I can't recall.
My favorite Hsu story was of watching a Hollywood movie in China in the 40's and how Chinese people could interpret the story completely differently than the moviemakers intended.
ReplyDeleteIt's even online at:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~billtong/chinaclass/hsu.htm
A matter of "refashioning" commercialism to meet their own needs...
ReplyDeleteAgain, way back when, I read an incredibly insightful book by historian Lizabeth Cohen. Now the internet even has notes on such books (I'm amazed and a bit freaked coz I recall how I used to spend hours and hours prodigiously taking notes on the books I read).
The book: Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.
Here's a bit from it and it feeds into the overall discussion here:
"In 1919, Chicago's workers relied upon their ethnic neighborhoods for both entertainment and sustenance - they read ethnic-language newspapers, shopped at the corner store, and, when hard times befell them, went to small ethnic-owned banks, neighborhood mutual benefit societies, or possibly the Catholic Church for aid. And at first, the rise of consumerism and mass culture served to strengthen these ethnic ties. Workers listened to Old World music on their radios and phonographs, saw films at small theaters in their own neighborhoods, and obtained credit from their local grocer. In sum, "whether they were were ethnic workers who eased into mass culture through the local store, neighborhood theater, and ethnic radio program or black and young workers who refashioned commercialism to their own needs," Cohen notes (against the standard interpretation of an all-homogenizing consumerism), "mass culture would not make them feel any less Polish, Jewish, or black or any less of a worker."
It is interesting to note in passing the unique position of black workers to the encroachment of mass culture. "Because assimilation into the mainstream was possible for white ethics," writes Cohen, "they used mass culture to stave it off by keeping their own culture alive. Ethnic records, like stores, theaters, and radio programs, set out to reinforce traditional culture in the face of threatening alternatives. Racial discrimination, on the other hand, kept blacks from the same opportunities, and pressures, to assimilate. Given that very different context, black jazz recordings, or black employment in chain stores, became a vehicle for making a claim on mainstream society that racism had otherwise denied. Mass culture, which offered ethnics a conservative retreat, became in the hands of blacks a way of turning blacks' vulnerability and dependence on mainstream society into a demand for respect." (156) Cohen returns to this intriguing relationship between consumerism and civil rights in her second book, A Consumers' Republic.
READING NOTES HERE
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteTo bring it up to today: look at hip-hop. Now the sartorial bling that that goes along with rappers - the jewelry, the massive SUVs, the constant referencing in the lyrics about expensive brandies etc....that is an interesting relationship between mass culture and ethnic blah blah.
ReplyDeleteI think that mass culture - and all the many different ways it can be used, is a good thing and nothing to be scared of. The problem is, the intellectuals and liberal middle classes have a problem with 'mass' in general, these days. It was the same in Orwell's day. Bless him but he did go on about tinned food being the end of civilization as we know it.
It wasn't George...it's the same with Super Size Me....et al...
The Papaya craze has made its way to the US. Look at Yahoo and ABC News. Neither mentions Urszula, though.
ReplyDeleteProblems with Mass?
At Eastertime?
:-)
ReplyDeletedoes anyone think porn is the only business still thriving during the credit cruch? I think many folks seek refuge in buying and wanking porn during the crunch
ReplyDeleteNot many other manufacturers which i can consider of give whatever close to this.
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