“I’m doing shoes because I’m going back to my roots. In fact, I think maybe I should do nothing but [laughs] shoes from now on.”
—Andy Warhol 

ⁱ

Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, as much a self-portrait as a symbol of pop culture, are among the most exciting pieces to emerge from Warhol’s work in the 1980s that reviewed and collated the defining images of his career: the shoes make reference to the genesis of his artistic practice as a commercial illustrator in 1950s New York, where he found early success as “the Leonardo da Vinci of the shoe trade.”ⁱⁱ As art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum writes, “Warhol’s personal retrospection has a fully public face, typical of the rapidly escalating historicism of the late twentieth century. It is revealing that Warhol’s subjects in the sixties were almost all contemporary, culled from the news of the day ... But by the eighties, Warhol, like everybody else it would seem, began to look constantly backward, conforming to the century’s twilight mood of excavating memories.”ⁱⁱⁱ

As such, Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes demonstrates the artist sanctifying and elevating shoes, a mass-produced commodity, to the status of the iconic and glamorous men and women who so often served as his subjects. Here, they are appropriated to represent the flashy and thrilling world of fame and style Warhol now inhabited by the 80s, not in the background as a modest fashion illustrator on Madison Avenue, but as an active participant in the disco and stilettos of Studio 54 among the New York glitterati.  

To source the imagery for his Diamond Dust Shoes, Warhol would send his master printer Rupert Jasen Smith out to discount stores to buy women's shoes by the dozen. Then, back at his studio on the north side of Union Square, the shoes were laid out on white paper to be photographed in various compositions. Once happy with the photographs, Warhol gave the shoes away; anyone in the studio could have them. The idea for employing diamond dust also came from Smith, who used the industrial by-product in his own works. However, real diamond dust proved difficult to work with for the results Warhol desired, so instead glass was ordered from an industrial supply company in New Jersey to use in its place. This faux diamond dust glistened and sparkled to Warhol’s liking, offering a wry aside in the artist’s ongoing commentary on our cultural relationship to simulacrum and reproduction. This glinting layer adds quite literal glamour, a sheen of decadence and enchantment, to Warhol’s surface – a surface to which he famously compared himself. As he said, “if you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”^iv

However, there is far more at work here than a sparkling allusion to the image of glitz and glamour Warhol projected for himself. Warhol had a long-standing interest in shoes, well beyond his commercial illustrations and later prints and paintings. Over the last thirteen years of his life, he created over 600 time capsules in which he collected and sealed thousands of objects into cardboard boxes. As the Andy Warhol Foundation has opened them, they have been found to contain dozens of shoes including some owned by celebrities such as Clark Gable – and, rather more surprisingly, a 2000-year-old mummified foot. Just as the ancient Egyptians wished to preserve their dead, in Diamond Dust Shoes Warhol created a glittering afterlife for the object of his fascination, here enshrined in the darkness of a black-on-black palette as if stowed away for safekeeping.

ⁱAndy Warhol quoted in P. Hackett, (ed.), The Andy Warhol Diaries, 1989, p. 306
ⁱⁱ Women’s Wear Daily, quoted in David Bourdon, Warhol, 1989, p.42
ⁱⁱⁱ Robert Rosenblum, ‘Warhol as Art History’ in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, 1989, p.32
^iv Gretchen Berg, ‘Andy, My True Story,’ Los Angeles Free Press, March 1967, p.3