Nobody asked why Dorothy’s shoe color changed.

For decades, audiences accepted ruby slippers as though Baum had always written them that way, as though the most famous pair of shoes in American storytelling had always been red. They hadn’t. In L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, the magic shoes are silver. Practical. Lunar. Quietly powerful in the way that modest things sometimes are.

Hollywood changed them. Because, of course it did. On purpose. A symbol.

The official explanation is Technicolor, the new three-strip process could render red with a vibrancy that would make audiences lean forward in their seats, and silver would have read as dull, maybe even gray. A production decision. A technical consideration. Perfectly reasonable. Right?

Right.

When you change a symbol, you change what it means. Silver carries the moon, restraint, hidden power, the kind that doesn’t announce itself. Red carries blood. Red carries desire. Red carries a history so old and so layered that the people making costume decisions in 1938 may not have fully understood what they were reaching for when they dyed those slippers. Or, maybe they did.

Symbols always know. They carry their histories whether we do or not. And symbolism will be their downfall.

The Cost of Red

Before red was a fashion choice, it was a conquest.

The ancient world wanted red desperately and could barely have it. The richest, most stable red dye came from kermes, tiny insects harvested from oak trees across the Mediterranean, crushed by the thousands to yield a color that faded slowly and ran deep into fiber. It took staggering quantities of the creatures to dye a single garment. The labor was backbreaking and the yield was small, but the color? The color was extraordinary.

And so red became the color of people who could afford to consume without restraint.

Tyrian purple gets most of the historical attention, but red was its close cousin in the economy of restricted color. Roman magistrates wore it. Warriors returning in triumph wore it. The Roman general given a triumph, that rare, nearly sacred honor, had his entire body painted red for the procession. Red was not decoration. Red was declaration.

Then the New World opened, and everything changed.

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico, they found the Aztecs producing a red so saturated, so luminous, so absolutely unlike anything Europe had ever seen that it would eventually upend the entire global textile market. The source was cochineal. A scale insect living on prickly pear cactus, harvested by indigenous hands, dried and crushed into a powder that produced a red of almost violent intensity.

Spain recognized immediately what they had. They classified cochineal as a state secret. The identity of the source, what creature, plant, and process, was suppressed for nearly two centuries. European dyers were working with something they couldn’t explain or replicate, dependent entirely on Spanish supply chains that ran through conquered land and broken people.

Red cloth dyed with cochineal became one of the most valuable commodities in the world.

Think about that the next time you see the color hanging casually on a rack.

The red that draped the powerful was red purchased with empire. With forced labor. With the systematic extraction of indigenous knowledge and indigenous bodies in service of a color that European aristocracy wanted on their backs. Every cardinal’s robe, every royal slipper, every flag that flew over a seat of power, that red had a price paid by people who never got to wear it.

Which brings us to the ones who did.

Shod in the Blood of Martyrs

For more than a thousand years, the Bishop of Rome wore red shoes.

Not as fashion nor as preference. As theology made visible.

The papal red shoe is one of the oldest continuous symbolic traditions in Catholicism, and its meaning was never ambiguous to the people who understood it. The red did not signify wealth, though wealth was certainly present. It didn’t signify power, though power was certainly implied. The red signified blood. Specifically, it was proposed to signify the blood of the martyrs, those first Christians ground under Roman heel, fed to lions, set aflame in Nero’s gardens. Those whose suffering was understood as the very foundation upon which the Church was built. That is the story.

Every pope who slipped his feet into red shoes was claiming to make a statement of theological succession: ‘I stand where they stood. I walk in what they shed. The Church was purchased at a price, and I carry that price on my body.’

The shoes appeared in papal dress as far back as the early medieval period, codified and ritualized over centuries into something inseparable from the office itself. They were part of the broader tradition of papal red: the mozzetta, the camauro, the saturno hat in earlier eras, a whole vocabulary of crimson that wrapped the pope in the color of sacrifice. Red was not merely what he wore. Red was what he represented.

When a new pope was elected, he was led to the Room of Tears, so named because of the weight of what had just happened to a man, and there, among the white cassock and the white zucchetto, were the red shoes. Waiting. A symbol that had outlasted dynasties and heresies and schisms and reformations and two world wars. A symbol that said: this office is older than you, heavier than you, and you will carry it now.

And then Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis.

And he left the red shoes in the room.

Francis walked out in plain black orthopedic shoes. The same ones he had worn as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. The gesture was so quiet and so pointed that it landed like a thunderclap in Vatican-watching circles. He wore black shoes throughout his pontificate. No red. No blood on his feet. No visual continuity with the thousand-year tradition he inherited.

The explanations offered on his behalf were characteristically humble. He was used to them. They were comfortable. He is a simple man. I am not Catholic and hold a long lens of suspicion, but, even I respected and understood that maybe, just maybe, Francis was different.

But symbols are never simple, and Francis knows this better than almost anyone alive. A man who chooses his words and his gestures with the precision he consistently demonstrates does not accidentally decline a thousand years of theological symbolism. He declines it on purpose, or he accepts it. There is no neutral.

What the refusal meant is something Catholics and observers have argued since 2013. Some read it as humility, a deliberate distancing from the imperial trappings that have accumulated around an office meant to represent a carpenter’s fisherman. Some read it as a rebuke of tradition, one in a series of gestures that have defined his papacy as one long argument with his predecessors. Some read it as something more unsettling: a severing, intentional or not, from the specific theology, biblical or otherwise, the red shoes carried. The weight of what was purchased.

You can disagree about what Francis meant. You cannot disagree that he knew exactly what he was doing.

When a symbol that has endured a thousand years is set aside, the setting aside is itself a symbol.

And red shoes, as we are about to see, have a way of meaning things whether their wearers intend it or not.

The Girl Who Could Not Stop

If you happen to be a literary fanatic like me, you know that fairy tales are not so sweet. In fact, they are almost always, without fail, telling the ugliest truth, wrapped up in a tale. That is how fairy tale writers tried to show the world the facts. Shakespeare did the same. It’s an age old tactic to inform the public. Fairy Tales are in truth the horrific acts of humanity, just in story form. Fairy tales are the stuff of nightmares.

Hans Christian Andersen was not writing a children’s story. A century and a half of being shelved in the nursery section has done serious damage to what The Red Shoes actually is. It’s a story about pride, coveting, and divine judgment so fierce that it would make a Puritan uncomfortable. Andersen dressed it in a little girl and a pair of dancing shoes, but the bones underneath are Calvinist, almost severe. A moral architecture that assumes God is watching, that vanity has consequences, and that some desires, left unchecked, will destroy you.

Here is what actually happens in the story, stripped of sentiment.

Karen is a poor child taken in by a wealthy old woman who is nearly blind. When it comes time for confirmation, that solemn moment of Catholic commitment, of standing before God and the congregation and declaring yourself, Karen fixates on a pair of red shoes. Not the white shoes appropriate to the occasion. Red shoes. The shoes of vanity and desire, the color of wanting what isn’t yours. She wears them to her confirmation. She is thinking about them during the ceremony, during the sacrament, when her attention should be entirely elsewhere.

Andersen makes the moment of transgression precise. She is not merely vain. She is vain before God, at the altar, at the exact moment consecrated for something other than herself.

And then the shoes begin to dance.

They dance at appropriate moments first, which is almost worse. They dance at a ball, where dancing is expected, but Karen cannot stop when she wishes to. The shoes have her. Then they dance at the graveside of the old woman who sheltered her. They dance past the church she cannot enter. They dance through night and weather and exhaustion until Karen, desperate, finds an executioner and asks him to cut off her feet.

He does.

The feet in the red shoes dance away without her. Karen is fitted with wooden feet and crutches and spends the rest of the story in penitent service until she is finally granted grace, but not restoration, not the return of what she lost, but grace. Forgiveness. Enough.

Andersen knew exactly what he was writing. He said so. The story was autobiographical in the way that fairy tales sometimes are, not in the literal details but in the spiritual ones. He was writing about desire that possesses rather than liberates. About reaching for symbols of a station you haven’t earned and don’t understand. About what happens when the thing you covet becomes the thing that controls you.

The red shoes in Andersen are not evil in themselves. They are dangerous because of what Karen brings to them: the hunger, the pride, the willingness to wear them before God at the moment most requiring humility. The shoes simply reveal what was already there.

This is theologically serious. The shoes don’t corrupt Karen. Karen corrupts herself, and the shoes make it visible and then inescapable.

There is an old idea, woven through Scripture and through the best of Christian moral theology, that our desires shape us. That what we reach for, we become. That coveting is not merely wanting. It is a reorientation of the self toward the wrong thing, and that reorientation, left unrepented, bends you permanently out of truth.

Andersen put that idea in red shoes and sent a little girl dancing to her own destruction.

He understood something about the color that the Aztec harvesters understood, that the Roman generals understood, that the medieval popes understood, and that Hollywood would deliberately choose in 1938.

Red is not a neutral color.

Red wants something from you.

The Shoes That Would Not Let Her Go

Michael Powell understood Andersen completely.

That is the only explanation for what he made in 1948 — a film so visually ravishing, so emotionally devastating, so theologically precise beneath its ballet-world glamour that it stands nearly eight decades later as one of the great works of British cinema. The Red Shoes is not an adaptation of Andersen’s fairy tale so much as it is a parallel translation. The same moral architecture, the same terrible logic, dressed now in tulle and ambition and the particular cruelty of the artistic world at its most demanding.

The setup is deceptively simple.

Victoria Page wants to dance more than she wants anything else on earth. Boris Lermontov wants dancers who want to dance more than they want anything else on earth. They find each other, and for a time it is perfect. She ascends, she is cast in the company’s new production of The Red Shoes, she becomes what she was always meant to become. Then she falls in love with Julian Craster, the young composer who scored the ballet, and Lermontov is forced to choose between them.

He chooses the dance. He always chooses the dance.

And here is where Powell is doing something more than telling a love story. Lermontov is not simply a jealous impresario or a cold-hearted villain. He is a man who has made a total consecration. Every human impulse subordinated to art, every relationship evaluated by what it produces or destroys in the work. He believes, with the fervor of a religious devotee, that great art requires this. That you cannot serve two masters. That the dancer who chooses love has chosen against dancing, and he will not pretend otherwise.

He is not entirely wrong. That is what makes him so disturbing.

Vicki cannot resolve the contradiction. She loves Julian. She loves the dance. She cannot cut one away cleanly, as Karen’s executioner cut away her feet, because both loves are genuine and both run all the way down to her foundation. Lermontov offers her the stage on the night Julian has come back for her. She puts on the red shoes.

And then Powell does something extraordinary.

He lets the shoes decide.

Vicki in the red shoes moves toward the stage, and then past it, and then to the balcony railing above the railway below, and she goes over. The shoes carry her to her death as surely as they carried Karen through the graveyard and past the church door. Julian reaches her in time only to hold her as she dies, the red shoes still on her feet, the performance beginning without her on the stage below. This was the ballerina ghost story that haunted all of us young ballerinas even at the (purely haunted) Springer Opera House in Georgia - the ballerina who fell into the pit and died.

Lermontov walks to the microphone and announces to the audience that Vicki will not be dancing tonight. His voice breaks, the only moment in the film where his devotion to art fails to hold him together. Then the ballet proceeds. The spotlight finds an empty space where she would have stood.

Powell is asking the same question Andersen asked, in a different register.

What happens to a person wholly possessed by a desire? What happens when the thing you were made to do becomes the thing that unmakes you? Is the desire itself the problem, or is the problem the world that cannot hold two great desires in one human life without destroying both?

Andersen answered with theology: pride and coveting bring judgment, and judgment is severe but grace is available to the penitent.

Powell answered with tragedy: some contradictions cannot be resolved, only survived or not.

Both answers live inside the red shoes. Both answers have lived there since before Andersen, since before the papal cobblers, since before the conquistadors watched cochineal dissolve into water and turn it the color of blood.

The shoes carry everything we have ever put into them.

And Then the World Democratized the Symbol

Christian Louboutin was twenty years old when he first sketched a shoe with a red sole. I have, unfortunately, not done my diligence as of this article into researching who and what Louboutin was connected to. As famous as his red bottomed footwear became among elites, I can speculate with almost certainty.

He has told the origin story many times, with the ease of a man who knows a good myth and has made peace with telling it. He saw an assistant painting her nails red. He grabbed the bottle and painted the sole of a prototype. He liked what he saw. The red sole became his signature, eventually his trademark; legally defended, culturally recognized, one of the most successful acts of personal branding in the history of fashion.

But Louboutin did not invent the meaning. He inherited it.

The red sole is the sumptuary law inverted. For centuries, red on the body was legally and economically restricted to those with the power to claim it. Royalty, clergy, the highest reaches of the aristocracy. Common people were forbidden the color not merely by price but by law. To wear red above your station was not a fashion mistake. It was a crime.

Louboutin’s genius was to take that thousand-year-old signal of restricted power and put a price tag on it. Now anyone can wear the red. Anyone with enough money, which is its own form of the old restriction — the barrier has shifted from bloodline to bank account, but the barrier remains. The red sole says what the cardinal’s shoes said, what the papal slippers said, what the conquistadors’ cochineal-dyed cloth said to every eye that saw it in the markets of Europe.

I have access to something you don’t.

The women who wear Louboutins are not loudly claiming publicly, for the most part, their footwear is about martyrs’ blood or Aztec insects or Andersen’s Karen dancing past the church she cannot enter. They are, for all public purposes, apparently thinking about the shoe. The height, the line, the particular confidence that comes from wearing something beautiful and expensive and recognized.

But the symbol thinks for itself. Symbolism will be the downfall.

It carries its history in the dye, in the leather, in the flash of red sole visible with every step. A signal so old that it works on people who have never heard of kermes beetles or papal tradition or a little girl who wanted what wasn’t hers to have.

Red has always done this.

It bypasses the mind and speaks directly to something older.

What the Symbol Knows

Symbols do not require understanding to function.

That is the thing worth sitting with at the end of all this history. The Roman general didn’t need to explain the theology of red to the crowds lining the triumphal route, the color worked on them anyway. The peasant who saw a cardinal’s scarlet robes didn’t need a lecture on martyrdom to feel the weight of what he was looking at. July Garland in 1939 didn’t need to know about cochineal or sumptuary law to experience the real and horrible weight of being cast to wear those ruby slippers.

The symbol carries its own meaning. It has been doing so for thousands of years.

And this is what I find myself returning to, sitting with the full sweep of this history laid out like a long red thread through the centuries.

Powerful people have always known this.

Those powerful people have always understood that symbols speak when you are not speaking. That the right symbol worn in the right room says something to the room that your words never could. And always counting on the public to never notice.

I think about this when I notice red shoes in places that feel deliberate. On people who have access to enough money and enough counsel and enough cultural fluency to know what they are reaching for. On people who collect symbols the way others collect art. Not randomly, not casually, but with the appetite of those who understand that symbols are a form of power. Symbolism will be their downfall.

I am not making an accusation, or maybe I am. But, moreover, I am asking a question that the history demands.

When someone who moves in circles of significant power reaches for one of the oldest symbols of blood and authority and transgression, do they know what they are holding?

And if they do know, what are they saying?

Andersen’s Karen wanted the red shoes because they were beautiful and because they marked a world above her own. She did not understand what she was reaching for. That was precisely her undoing.

The people I am thinking of are not Karen. They are not naive about symbols. They have staffs and advisors and the accumulated cultural knowledge that comes with generations of operating at the highest levels of power. They do not reach for things accidentally.

So I come back to the question.

The shoes are red. They have always been red. They were red when they were painted on the feet of Roman generals and red when they were placed in the Room of Tears for a new pope and red when a costume designer in Hollywood dipped them in dye without fully understanding why it felt so right.

What does it mean when the powerful wear them now?

I am supposed to say the acceptable thing, that I truly don’t know.

But I know that symbols accumulate meaning across centuries like rivers accumulate silt — quietly, steadily, until the weight of what has settled there is enormous. And I know that the people who understand that are never quite the same as the people who don’t.

The red shoes know what they mean.

They have always known.

The only question is whether the we can discern if the people wearing them do too.

By a tired momma a coffee