Kinky Boots (film)

Kinky Boots is a 2005 British-American comedy-drama film written by Geoff Deane and Tim Firth, and directed by Julian Jarrold. Based on a true story, the movie tells of a struggling British shoe factory's young, strait-laced owner, Charlie, who forms an unlikely partnership with Lola, a drag queen, to save the business. Charlie develops a plan to produce custom footwear for drag queens, rather than the men's dress shoes that his firm is known for, and in the process, he and Lola discover that they are not so different after all.

Plot

In the town of Northampton, in the East Midlands of England, Charlie Price is attempting to save the family shoe factory, which has been floundering since his father died. While on a business trip to London to sell the company's extra stock, Charlie encounters a woman being harassed by drunken hoodlums and intervenes to his detriment. He wakes up back stage, in the dressing room of Lola, a drag queen performer and alter ego of Simon. Charlie is intrigued when he sees that drag queens' high heels snap easily since they have only women's shoes to wear, rather than those that can support the weight of a larger male body frame. Back in Northampton, while in the process of making his workers redundant, one employee, Lauren, gives Charlie the idea of looking for a niche market product to save the business. Charlie then recruits Lauren to assist him in designing a high-heeled boot for Lola, initially as a thank-you, but later as a means of finding a niche to save the factory.

Kinky boots

Kinky boots are boots with extreme characteristics which are intended to present a dramatic sexy appearance, such as by a prostitute or dominatrix. Extreme characteristics might include very high heels, thigh- or crotch-high length, or unusual colors or materials. Boots like this can be related to boot fetishism, which thus makes them a form of fetish clothing. The term is ambiguous, since what can be considered kinky by some can be seen as elegant fashion by others.

Boots of this type, and specifically the thigh-high leather boots worn by Honor Blackman in her role as Cathy Gale in The Avengers, are referred to in the 1964 song "Kinky Boots" by Blackman and her Avengers co-star Patrick Macnee. Usually, nowadays the term is connected to the type of thigh-length boots used by Julia Roberts in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman and by Madonna in her Re-Invention Tour in 2004.

Origin of the term

The term "kinky boots" was coined in the UK in the early 1960s when high boots, which had previously been worn in the "underground" fetish and sadomasochistic world of the dominatrix and her clients, broke into mainstream female fashion. The term "sexual kink", meaning not entirely straight, was used, often in a jocular sense, to describe an unusual sexual desire that was not sufficiently deviant to attract the word perversion. Since men who were attracted to women in boots, which symbolised power, were heterosexual, the term "kinky" was applied to them, rather than "perverted", which at that time mainly implied homosexuality. The term thus became applied to the boots that were worn by women because of their previous association with SM.

Kinky boots (disambiguation)

Kinky boots are boots, usually thigh-length, associated with boot fetishism.

Kinky Boots may also refer to:

Kinky Boots (song)

"Kinky Boots" is a 1960s song written by Herbert Kretzmer and David Lee, and recorded by Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman, stars of the television series The Avengers.

The music was commissioned by Ned Sherrin for the satirical TV series That Was the Week That Was and used in a sequence featuring the titular footwear (then fashionable). Lyrics were later added for a recording by Macnee and Blackman, released by Decca in February 1964. The song was not initially a hit, but a 1990 re-release reached the top ten of the British Singles Chart in December of that year, after the song was promoted by BBC Radio One DJ Simon Mayo. The single peaked at No.5 (on Deram records label KINKY 1) and remained on the chart for seven weeks. Prior to this, in 1977, it was placed at No.22 in the "Bottom 30" of Kenny Everett's World's Worst Wireless Show. The song is quite short: just one minute and thirty-seven seconds long.

Track listing

References

External links