text by Karly Quadros
It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stiletto. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.
Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.
Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.
Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City.
KARLY QUADROS: Can you tell me about the inception of the show?
AMANDA MCGOWAN: We started working with Taylor Trabulus at Company many years ago. Not very long after we started, she wanted to do a pop-up shop with us.
We were gonna maybe do an art show with her in the city at some other gallery, but there was drama and it didn't work out. Then she got promoted at Gavin Brown where she was working at the time, and basically she out of nowhere gave us this big art show opportunity there in 2018. After Gavin Brown ended [in 2020], she went to Company Gallery and we did another solo show there, and then they signed us on as artists. We've been working with them since Covid, like 2021.
This show was actually their idea. It was their idea to do an overview of all the shoes that we've done over the past five years because we actually didn't realize how many we have done. There’s a lot and they're all different. Some have been seen in an art context. Some were in fashion shows. But in a way, they work as standalone art objects, so it made sense to show them in that way.
The displays that we created for the show, those platforms, were actually wall works that we did for the show at Company in 2021. We made all these prints on paper and then we did these collages imitating ads because that show in 2021 was about recreating an abandoned mall space. The panels were to mimic advertising or storefront environments.
QUADROS: The shoe is such a deceptively simple concept, but there’s a lot that emerges when you see them all next to each other like that. At Autre, our last issue just went to press and the theme was ‘desire.’ We actually had Mia Khalifa on the cover wearing your paw shoe.
MCGOWAN: I saw that! We were talking recently – speaking of desire – about how there is such a sexual element to shoes, a sensuality.
QUADROS: They’re the ultimate fetish object.
MCGOWAN: They are. There’s something about seeing the shoe alone too, not on a foot, which is its own fetish.
QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about how fetish and sexuality play into your design practice here in the show and elsewhere?
MCGOWAN: I feel like clothes have such a relationship to those topics because there’s such a rapport with the human form, with the body. I feel like it’s one of the reasons it’s not considered an art form because it has this feminine and bodily quality to it that makes it segmented away from formal art world consideration for most people.
MATTIE RIVKAH BARRINGER: There’s just so much loaded with fashion mentally for people. Women are expected to be sexually available or sexually pleasing in a patriarchal society, and clothing is such an interesting way to interfere in those types of codes and signals and take ownership over being specimenized in this way as a woman.
MCGOWAN: Inherently, clothing and shoes are binding the body. There is this kind of BDSM quality to clothing, and shoes specifically – there’s something about a heel controlling the foot, constricting it, the animal claw within the shoe. There’s something very animalic about human feet – this kind of unruly, weird part of the body – and aestheticizing and controlling it with this beautiful shoe.
We use a lot of animalic references in the shoes as well. There’s something about female sexuality and animal prints, animal symbology that I feel is somehow connected. Specifically in the fashion industry and in art history, the connection between the animal and the sexual and the woman is so saturated in the imagery. It also, I think, has been interpreted in contemporary feminism perhaps as a degrading comparison. We’re interested in that comparison because I feel like there can be a degrading aspect of it, but then there’s also this other countercurrent where it is kind of positive: I think of Jungian psychology, the positive anima where you’re in this positive relationship acknowledging the animal side of yourself as a human animal. Something about that to us is interesting or empowering to think about.
And yet, at the same time, we’re trying to point out the possibly negative ways that humans can be animals towards each other in a very cruel world. There’s a lot of very dualistic things about the whole animal reference that is interesting to us in our work.
QUADROS: It’s interesting because fashion is one of the major things that separates humans from animals. We adorn our bodies; animals do not. There’s something maybe post-human about it – does that resonate with you?
BARRINGER: I feel like throughout time, women and animals have been exploited and used in a lot of ways. So there's also that connection where there's something inherently feminine perhaps about animals too.
MCGOWAN: Everybody does participate in adorning themselves whether or not they consider themselves interested in fashion. It's an activity that is distinctly human.
BARRINGER: In its more negative permutations, the actual industry and making of clothing has a cruelty that we could attribute to like the animalistic behavior of just devouring and consumption.
QUADROS: Some of the shoes – for instance the ones with the bent and broken hooves – recall the sculptures of Meret Oppenheim. I also think of the cloven toe of Margiela tabis, which I’ve seen elicit really strong reactions from people who aren’t invested in fashion. Can you talk a little bit about your exploration of abjection, the uncanny, and yuckiness in your work?
MCGOWAN: There's such a fine line between femininity being beautiful and being abject. Within the patriarchal reality spectacle, if a woman has too much makeup and you can tell that she's wearing makeup, it's grotesque, but if she's wearing the type of makeup that really makes her look natural or youthful, then she's beautifully feminine.
We’re very interested in this historical time travel – what the codes were at one time that are different from now and how different depictions and ideals of femininity throughout time contradict the ones we have now.
BARRINGER: Also living in New York City is so abject. We’re very close to abjection all the time. There’s something very medieval about being in New York City. When I’m making something that I think is beautiful, it makes sense to have something abject as part of it in a weird way because it feels like that’s the world that I’m in. It feels more true.
QUADROS: Do you guys have any gross or crazy New York stories?
MCGOWAN: My God, where do I begin? The first show that we did that was a big production last February, somebody punched Mattie in the face on the subway, literally going to see the venue.
QUADROS: Oh my God, I’m so sorry.
MCGOWAN: I feel like New York City has gotten so crazy. It’s like an open air institution.
BARRINGER: I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a dead body yet in New York. I feel like the area we’re in feels so charged from a past time. Looking into New York history, that area used to be like the financial district. It was a port because it’s right on the water, and there was crazy stuff happening there throughout time. You can feel that history.
QUADROS: I feel like that’s certainly reflected in New York fashion right now. Your clothes feel really interested in the messiness or the intensity of the city.
MCGOWAN: I think it feels more, like you’re saying, like the reality. We’re in a time where you’re very confronted with reality. There is a need for fantasy as well, which we try to do, but we also need to acknowledge the reality at the same time.
BARRINGER: Fantasy needs to be mitigated with something that feels more honest to us.
QUADROS: New York is so known for its extremely functional shoes – power suits and sneakers, squishy foamy Crocs. They have to be functional since it’s a city ruled by pedestrians. Meanwhile the shoes in the show are distinctly less functional: towering wooden platforms, Victorian-style shin braces. What do you think of when you think of New York footwear? How do your own designs work with or against that?
MCGOWAN: Mattie has always worn platforms since I’ve known her for the past fifteen years.
BARRINGER: I find platforms easy to walk in, but I just have always wanted to be taller. I’m five foot three, so I always wanted to be tall.
MCGOWAN: She always wears Vivienne Westwood rocking horse shoes, which for me, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk around the city in them, but for her, they’re comfortable.
BARRINGER: I like being above street level when I can ‘cause it feels very beautiful. I feel cleaner somehow.
QUADROS: My dear friend who lived here for a long time told me when I moved here, don’t wear open-toed shoes unless it’s a platform because a rat will run over your feet.
BARRINGER: [laughs] A hundred percent. My husband, he’s from Singapore, so he likes wearing open-toed shoes, and he only wears flats. He’s the only New Yorker that I’ve ever seen who wears sandals on the ground.
MCGOWAN: I do think there’s an obsession. For me, I wouldn’t wear heels all the time in New York. We’re interested in the fantasy of what shoes could be. If I could make a shoe that I could wear every day, not in a practical way, what would it look like? That’s how they also become an art object because they’re not really functional things. These ones have a bit of a defensive quality, like they have a weapon built in basically.
BARRINGER: We felt so enveloped in the New York atmosphere. We were really looking at the buildings and the statues. This post-human thing where you are becoming the city, the metal and the hard building materials felt like something that we were really talking about with the clothes we were doing in the last year.
QUADROS: In many ways, it’s the exact opposite of the ballet flat, which has recently come back.
MCGOWAN: And it’s not comfortable either. I used to wear ballet flats all the time when I was younger, and my feet always hurt.
BARRINGER: There’s no support.
MCGOWAN: I’m always frustrated with shoe options. My whole life, I’m always dissatisfied with what’s available and what is functional but attractive. Even though there’s a lot of shoes, a lot of them are not great in different ways.
QUADROS: What have you settled on now?
MCGOWAN: I wear Marithé Francois Girbaud vintage shoes because there’s something about the split soles, the rubber shoe, it laces up the front. It’s a supportive ankle situation. Something about the way that those shoes are made are so comfortable to me but they’re also attractive. Like they don’t look like grandma.
The boys in New York City will stop me all the time and be like, “Bro, your shoes are so sick.” And I’m just like, “They’re just comfortable.”
QUADROS: When you’re sourcing now, where are you looking in terms of beauty and inspiration?
MCGOWAN: It’s almost like we’re thinking about archaeology or something. Our practice of souring materials and vintage can feel quite archaeological and specific, looking for, I don’t know, maybe a narrative or an untold story. I think for our next collection we’re thinking about archaeology as this search for self and identity through clothing and also thinking of these as artifacts or monumental objects.
I don’t think we’re going to do an actual fashion show. We’re going to do a lookbook in tandem with an art exhibition, so we’re also thinking of clothing that’s going to stand on its own and not really have to be in movement.
BARRINGER: We always think of ourselves as weird time travelers from a time that didn’t exist. Like historical futurism.
QUADROS: The Fifth Element. Spaceships, but also the pyramids.
BARRINGER: Exactly. There’s so much history and so many stories, people’s individuality that we don’t know about throughout time.
QUADROS: So you’re not doing New York Fashion Week then?
MCGOWAN: We are not this year. We might release a lookbook around Fashion Week, but we’re not doing a show until next year. We’re burnt out. We’re very interested in doing more shows in the future. We really want to take time to do a show in Paris in the future. So we just need to regroup and take time.
Fashion moves so fast, and it’s not always realistic to create things at that level when you’re self-funded. It’s just us and our interns. It’s not like we have a giant team. For us, this has been the most rigorous fashion schedule that we’ve shown on. It’s been three shows within the space of a year.
And doing runway is a lot. It doesn’t look like it’s as much work as doing an art show or an exhibition, but it’s actually so much harder in comparison when you don’t have endless resources to pour into it. It’s one of the hardest types of creation because there’s not only the functionality of the garment, there’s the live element. It’s basically working for six months on something that’s gonna be seen for twenty minutes. You have to have so many relationships and people involved. In New York especially it’s hard to find venues. It’s a whole thing.
QUADROS: Fashion Week is in a weird place right now too. Your show in particular had a lot of buzz, a lot of really positive responses that what you’re doing is something unique.
MCGOWAN: Thank you. And we don’t wanna abandon New York. I think a lot of our inspiration and identity is very linked to this place, but it’s an experiment that we want to show in Paris. We’re also interested in French fashion history and that lineage. So it feels like a personal goal.
Image courtesy of Company Gallery