baubled and impractical fashions during the
Enlightenment and the short-lived female
departure from them during the French
Revolution. Wartime pragmatism re-blurred
the distinct gender lines that had been
drawn.
IMVU has given its users the same
sort of aristocratic leisure with their avatars
that King Louis XIV gave his courtiers in
Versailles. The avatars can afford to be
draped in the finest of impractical fashions.
They do not have to walk or do manual
labour. They also have the added boon of
not being susceptible to fatigue or pain.
Their feet cannot be damaged by extreme
shoe fashions like their user’s can. In the
“real world”, hobbling-sized stilettos are
meant for special occasions, but an avatar
can stand in red carpet footwear
indefinitely. A point is soon reached where
an IMVU model is no longer imitating life,
but becoming a work of art. An expression
of an impossible ideal that would not exist
without the digital tools provided. It is a
reinforcement of what Wilde wrote about
“the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life
is to find expression, and that Art offers it
certain beautiful forms through which it may
realise that energy.”
A quick look through the shoes in
IMVU’s catalogue shows a vast difference
from the imaginings of Roger Vivier’s first
sculptural stilettos in the 1950’s. The high
heel has come a long way from the
powerful image of a warrior astride their
horse, plate mail glinting in the sunlight
replaced by glossy pornographic postcards
of photos of women in nothing but their
shoes. In IMVU’s client, they are taken even
further than the extreme arch of a Barbie’s
foot. An avatar’s foot is perpetually arched,
the fetish silhouette of a ballet boot
becoming the standard shape in even the
most casual of heels.
But why is this aesthetic so popular?
Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist
at Rutgers University, says that: “High heels
thrust out the buttocks and arch the back
into a natural mammalian courting —
actually, copulatory — pose called ‘lordosis.’
It is a naturally sexy posture that men immediately see as sexual readiness. [Heels] are
a ‘come hither’ signal…” This coupled with
the idea of a supernormal stimulus, coined
by Nikolaas Tinbergen, could explain that
the unrealistic contortion of fictional
anatomy is so popular. A supernormal
stimulus or superstimulus is an exaggerated
version of a stimulus to which there is an
existing response tendency, or any stimulus
that elicits a response more strongly than
the stimulus for which it evolved. In layman’s
terms, a larger or more prominent version
of a feature beneficial for evolution or survival, even if impossible in nature, will be
more attractive.