The death of Wang I-lü: modern Chinese women in high heels, 1920s–1940s

Abstract In July 1939, Wang I-lü, a recent high school graduate, was reported to have fallen down a staircase while wearing high heels. The accident triggered heated public debates in Shanghai. Some condemned high heels as dangerous and decadent; others defended them, while Wang’s classmates denied Wang had ever worn them. Amid these conflicting voices, this article treats the death of Wang I-lü not as a question of forensic fact but as a historically situated event, one that maps the cultural trajectory of the high heel in modern China. Wang I-lü’s accident is indeed not an isolated incident: high-heeled women were frequently depicted falling down. The falling-down girl phenomenon encapsulates, as argued, a mixture of male affects, including fears of modernity, voyeuristic fascination, nationalist concerns, and the urge to control the female body. Meanwhile, women also held ambivalent attitudes toward high heels, though in different ways. They either regarded the high heel as a sign of vanity or employed it to negotiate visibility and identity. The high heel thus constitutes not only an object of foot fetishism, one that fuses Freudian male desire with Foucauldian biopolitical control, but also a thing utilized by women for imagining and enacting varied forms of womanhood, forms that were not necessarily resistant to men nor entirely emancipatory or conservative but rather responded to women’s own diverse circumstances.