Your President in Flip-Flops

It is unusual to see the president’s feet, but the New York Post revealed yesterday that Barack Obama showed his toes in Hawaii last week. Barack Obama in flip-flops, after Reagan in cowboy boots at Camp David and Kennedy in deck shoes.

In France, we expound only upon Nicolas Sarkozy’s heel lifts.

In the United States, recalls the New York Post, Nixon’s curious habit of walking along the shore in wingtip shoes had also already been remarked upon as had Carter’s emotion when he spotted, alarmed, the first sneakers on the feet of his young campaigners. Meghan Cleary, author of

“What Your Shoes Say About You,” remarks, “I can think of no other president photographed in flip-flops.”

As for George W. Bush, he likes crocs, with ankle socks …

In an article in Psychanalyse magazine, one can read that the shoe “says a lot about our desires, our fantasies and, secondarily, about our needs.”

Continuing: “The high heel is perceived as a instrument of power and seduction.” In an article from Psychologies that speaks instead about a woman’s relationship with her shoes: “We tend towards functional shoes when we want to be youthful, quick, responsive.”

The conclusion drawn by psychiatrist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Vannina Micheli-Rechtman, author of La Psychanalyse face à ses détracteurs: “The foot is the end of our body, of the display, it ends us. The shoe functions as protection, it is the foot’s garment that extends to remake the envelope, in other words: an inside and an outside.”