Old friend-turned-professional-semiotician (wait, that didn’t come out right) Scott Hamrah interviewed by n+1 about the transformation of the Payless Shoe Source logo from halloween garish to an exercise in tubular blandness:
Well, that’s true. Shoe shopping is like gathering tubers. Shoes are like potatoes … But I see it more as a sublimation of eating and of sex. I like women’s shoes a lot, personally. I’ve always said that if I could do it all over again, I’d be a women’s shoe designer … or a Nascar driver. Shoes are like cars; you slip into them. Anyway, as far as the colors of food go, I don’t buy that. I don’t believe in any of these neurological approaches or evolutionary ones either. These brain and gene studies that attempt to isolate why we “naturally†relate to phenomena the way we do — you can figure these things out by sitting around and thinking about it. You don’t need electrodes. Anyway, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but we can firmly believe today that buying shoes is like gathering tubers, and in the future people will be like “Oh yeah, right. That was back when people thought shoe shopping was like gathering tubers!â€