Shoes, heels, socks and stockings: when the fetish is what covers the foot

Feet lead every count of fetish interest, and the reasons are the subject of a separate article. This one follows the interest one layer out, to the shoe, the heel, the boot, the sock and the stocking. The move changes what the interest is. A foot is part of a person. A shoe is a thing that can sit on a shelf, be bought new, be worn by someone else, or be wanted with nobody in it at all.

The catalog files the two sides apart, and the numbers show how closely they travel together. Of the 29 entries in its foot collection, nine are garments or materials, and two of them, shoes and stockings, rank higher than every part of the foot except the foot itself.

Where the object ends and the foot begins

Clinicians have drawn the line between object and body, then erased it. A fetish in the diagnostic sense attaches to a nonliving object, and partialism to a part of the body, and from 1980 to 2013 the American manual kept them apart. Martin Kafka's 2010 review for the DSM-5 found the two related, often co-occurring and no longer worth separating, and since 2013 the manual has recorded them as specifiers of one diagnosis: nonliving objects, or body parts.

The people with the interest draw the line in their own way. In a 1995 survey by Weinberg, Williams and Calhan of 262 gay and bisexual men in a foot-fetish organisation, over 60% of those drawn to shoes said an unworn shoe held no interest for them, and about three in four said something about the wearer was needed as well. For most people in that sample, the shoe carried the charge because someone had been in it. The sample was a single club of men and cannot stand for everyone.

The catalog keeps the working distinction the entries use. Shoe fetish, high heel fetish, boot fetish, sock fetish and the hosiery entries target the object. Foot fetish and its parts target the body. A person can have one without the other, and many have both.

What the surveys count

Footwear and legwear sit at the top of every tally of garment fetishes. Scorolli and colleagues, working at the University of Bologna, classified 381 internet discussion groups reaching at least 5,000 people. Preferences for body parts or features made up 33% of the total, preferences for objects associated with the body 30%, and feet and the objects associated with feet were the most common target of all.

Inside the clothing groups the split looked like this.

Garment group	Share of clothing-fetish groups
Clothes worn on the legs or buttocks, stockings among them	33%
Footwear: shoes, boots and the rest	32%
Underwear	12%
Whole-body wear	9%

The two largest categories cover the foot and the leg. Together they are about two thirds of every clothing interest the study found, and underwear is a distant third.

The general population gives a smaller and blunter picture. Joyal and Carpentier's 2017 survey of 1,040 Quebec adults found interest in fetishism above the 15.9% line that marks a fantasy as statistically unusual, in men and women, with no significant difference between the sexes. The survey asked about fetishism as one category, so it cannot say how much of that interest is shoes and how much is anything else.

The shoe, the heel and the boot

The shoe fetish is the second-ranked entry in the clothing family, after lingerie, at an estimated 7% of adults and rank 38 of 486. Its clinical name, retifism, honours Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, the eighteenth-century French novelist whose Le Pied de Fanchette dwelt on women's footwear in a way readers have taken as autobiography. Casual English uses "shoe fetish" for anyone who owns too many pairs, which is why the entry separates it from fashion and from the sneakerhead subculture, where the shoe is a collectible and nothing sexual is involved.

The high heel narrows the interest to one feature, and the heel has a history of its own. Heeled footwear began as riding gear for Persian cavalry from the tenth century, reached Europe with the emissaries of Abbas the Great in the early seventeenth, and was worn first by aristocratic men, Louis XIV among them. Women took it up later in the century. The stiletto arrived in 1950, and wartime and post-war pin-up imagery tied heels to female sexuality. The catalog puts the high heel fetish at an estimated 4%, rank 92. Its pseudo-clinical name, altocalciphilia, is a modern coinage found in glossaries and in no medical index.

The boot pulls the interest toward leather and uniform. Boot fetish sits at rank 131 and an estimated 3%, and two entries sit beside it. The ballet boot, which holds the foot en pointe on a heel of seven inches or more, is the extreme end of the heel interest, at an estimated 0.6%. Bootblacking, the cleaning and polishing of a partner's boots as an act of service, belongs to the leather and BDSM world, where the boot is a thing to be cared for as much as looked at.

The last footwear entry is a movement. Shoeplay, a shoe dangled from the toes or slipped half off the heel, is estimated at 1.2%, and it is the one interest in the group that is watched more than worn.

Stockings, pantyhose and nylon

The legwear interests divide the same way the footwear ones do, by garment and by material. Stocking fetish matches the shoe fetish at an estimated 7%, rank 77. Pantyhose fetish sits at 3.5%, and nylon fetish, the fabric wherever it appears, at 2%. The difference matters to the people who have them: a nylon enthusiast may not care whether the fibre is a stocking, a slip or a windbreaker, and a stocking enthusiast may be content with silk.

These are fetishes with birthdays, because the garments were invented within living memory. DuPont introduced nylon in 1939. On 16 May 1940, the Smithsonian records, four million pairs went on sale across the United States and sold out within two days. After Pearl Harbor the fibre went to parachutes, tyre cords and rope, and women turned to paint-on stockings. When nylons came back in 1945 the shortage produced the nylon riots: in Pittsburgh, 40,000 people queued for 13,000 pairs.

Pantyhose came next. Allen Gant Sr. of Glen Raven Mills made the first one-piece "Panti-Legs" in 1953, they reached shops around 1959, and the miniskirt made them necessary. In 1970, pantyhose outsold stockings in the United States for the first time. The seamed stocking fetish, at 1.5%, is an interest in the back seam of the fully fashioned stocking, which circular knitting, making each stocking as one tube, had displaced by the early 1960s.

Socks and the worn object

The sock is the humblest item on the list and the one most tied to use. Sock fetish ranks 140th at an estimated 3.5%, and the entry describes an interest that runs from the look of a particular sock, white athletic or sheer dress, to the warmth and scent of one that has been worn. The scent form has its own entry, foot odor fetish, at 1.5%, filed with the other olfactory interests.

The worn object is where the covering and the foot meet. In the Weinberg survey, 58% of the men were also drawn to clothing and underwear, and especially to its smell. The same pattern fits the shoe results above: a garment that has held a foot carries something of the person, and for many people with the interest that trace is the point. A new pair in a box is a different object.

Two entries use the same footwear for a different purpose. In trampling and the lawful, object-based form of crush fetish, the shoe is an instrument of pressure and the appeal is the force. The shoe is present, and the shoe fetish is not.

How the catalog ranks the covering

The garment side of the foot interest is common by the catalog's measure, and it is common in a particular shape.

Entry	Rank of 486	Estimated prevalence
Shoe fetish	38	7%
Stocking fetish	77	7%
High heel fetish	92	4%
Pantyhose fetish	129	3.5%
Sock fetish	140	3.5%

Six of the nine highest-ranked entries in the Clothing & Garments family cover the foot or the leg: shoes, stockings, heels, pantyhose, boots and socks. The three that do not are lingerie, uniforms and panties. The garment family's reach runs mostly downward.

Against the foot, each covering is smaller. The foot fetish is estimated at 14% of adults and ranks fifth on the whole index; the shoe and the stocking each come to half of that. The catalog does not add the entries together, because the people overlap and a sum would count the same person several times. The methodology explains how each estimate is built and which survey anchors it.