Distinctive footwear, may that be shoes, sandals, or boots, make people more flesh out in the crowd. Very usually, their footwear are fancy, unusual and unique to one character (or that group) and they tell you more about the character's personality.
Related to Meaningful Appearance when a character's appearance symbolises something about them or their personality.
See also The One Who Wears Shoes as a character, who is usually anthropomorphic, to wear shoes in a world of barefooters.
Contrast Prefers Going Barefoot as the wearer would be barefoot and never wears shoes at all.
Examples
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Anime
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Silver Shoes. Interestingly, they start out looking like ordinary peasant shoes. Once Dorothy obtains them, the shoes magically change to a pair of shiny silver Mary Janes.
Comic Books
- The eponymous Hilda is almost never seen without her big red boots.
Fairy Tales
- Cinderella's iconic footwear is a pair of glass slippers magically created by her Fairy Godmother. After losing one of her shoes at the prince (or king)'s ball, it becomes his only way of finding her, due to their uniqueness.
Film - Live Action
- Jojo Rabbit: Rosie, Jojo's mother, wears a pair of red-and-white lace-up pumps throughout the movie. Near the end, there is a scene where Jojo follows a butterfly and since he is bending down, he doesn't notice he has walked under the town gallows until he straightens up and sees Rosie's distinctive shoes right in front of his face. He breaks down when he realizes his mother has been executed.
- Saturday Night Fever: The movie opens with a close-up of Tony's shoes. As he struts down the street, he compares his shoes to a store model's and is satisfied that they're similar.
- The Wizard of Oz has Dorothy Gale wearing the film's iconic Ruby Slippers — which were silver in the original book, but they didn't show up well on film, so they had to change the colour to make the shoes more visible.
Literature
- Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tale The Red Shoes features a pair of vibrant, magical red shoes that force the heroine to dance on them.
- Terra Ignota exaggerates this. Every member of the Humanist Hive wears personalized boots per their guiding philosophy of individual excellence and leaving a mark on history — wherever they walk, you can tell by the footprints who was doing the walking.
- Cato Weeksbooth, an Omnidisciplinary Scientist and teacher, has boots that are a wraparound display screen cycling through a live display of different anatomical layers of his feet, when they aren't showing an animal's feet or robotic feet.
- Superstar athlete Sniper has boots striped in the colors of the Olympics and covered in medals from the same (they barely fit in the available space).
- Ockham Saneer, legally allowed to commit murder in defense of the globally-vital infrastructure he manages, has boots made of steel and real leather from a deer he hunted and killed himself. He's also a member of a Government Conspiracy ring of assassins empowered to commit murder in defense of world peace.
- Mycroft is not a Humanist, but he wears shoes with soft bristles instead of soles so that any insects he trods on are brushed out of the way instead of killed, as he wishes to do no harm to any living being.
- In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy has the silver slippers, which she uses to get back home to Kansas. She uses a magic belt in later books.
Live Action TV
- Breaking Bad: The Salamanca Twins, a pair of cartel hitmen, wear distinct dress shoes with metal skulls adorned on the toes. A man who recognizes the shoes as signs of the cartel is immediately executed so he doesn't report the twins to the authorities.
- Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor wears a pair of red Converse sneakers alongside his otherwise unassuming suit and overcoat, tying in with his characterization as more openly eccentric than his predecessor. Of note is that the sneakers were suggested
by his actor, David Tennant; the production team wanted to give the Tenth Doctor a pair of Fourth Doctor-style boots, and fought hard to preserve the idea before Tennant won the argument. - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has Charlie Kelly's pair of vintage Vans Sk 8 His; black suede with red inner lining, red soles, and a white foxing stripe, which are occasionally shown off when he puts his feet up. Somewhat subverted as they appear to be Charlie's only shoes, appearing in every episode and really show it, with the sole textures wearing down, and large holes creeping up in the worn out heels as time goes on.
Music
- Graceland: "Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes".She is a rich girl, she don't try to hide it
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes. - Lit: Jeremy Popoff, the band's guitarist is famously known for his "hot rod" sneakers, which have white flames on top of a black background. He had them custom made and owns about 8-9 pairs and even wore them at his wedding, with his groomsmen wearing their own sets with the colors reversed. They even get a spotlight in the Music video for Miserable. In one of the video's signature scenes Jeremy gets devoured by the Giant Woman, who then pauses to spit out one of his famous shoes, which lands perfectly on the floor with a thud.
Video Games
- Battleborn: Pendles wears a dope pair of sneakers for sneaking. Said sneakers have a subtle squeak regardless of terrain.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Much was made of Sonic's Soap shoes in Sonic Adventure 2, and the Grinding ability that came with them. Sonic, however, has always had distinctive red/white shoes, since it's the only thing he wears (besides a pair of gloves).
- Shadow, meanwhile, has hoverjet-equipped white and red shoes that look identical to Gundam feet. May or may not be his actual feet as by some accounts he's a cyborg in addition to being genetically engineered.
- Since her redesign in Sonic Adventure, Amy Rose now sports a unique pair of red boots that has a white stripe on the front and matching cuffs to match with her red and white dress.
- Rouge equips herself with white thigh-high, high-heeled boots with hot pink cuffs and heart-shaped toe caps to kick things.
- Blaze wore similar shoes to Sonic’s except they were hot pink instead of red and high-heeled. Yet, she can able to run with them.
- Being from the future, Silver dons futuristic navy blue boots with white stripes similar to Amy’s, cyan toe caps, golden cuffs glowing cyan lights, and a red gem on each boot.
Webcomic
- The Order of the Stick: After spending the entire comic barefoot, Xykon gets Boots of Free Movement in Kragoor's Tomb and really likes them, because his toe bones no longer hit things.
Web Video
- CJ DaChamp: This is lampshaded, as Black Air Force energy is said to come off from everyone wearing solid black shoes. When people in Tokyo Revengers show up in all-black shoes, CJ takes it as a sign that everyone should be worried.
Western Animation
- In Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, the Gromble wears red high heels on his four feet.
- Boots the Monkey from Dora the Explorer has his distinctive red boots, hence his name, and he loves them as he is an Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal.
- Sid has his prized white Winklepicker Beatle boots in Hey Arnold!. They mean a lot to him and he'll cry when they are stolen or damaged. They were once stolen from him in "Monkeyman!" and in "Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie", they ultimately rip apart when they get stuck in the mud whilst having to hike with the group in the jungle after their boat gets wrecked.
- Hilda has her big red boots. She also has similar looking boots for her winter attire and school uniform.
- Florence from The Magic Roundabout wears her unique pair of big white laced ankle boots in a vintage "Babybotte" model where it has the trademark heel blocks at the back of her boots. These are what made the real life French shoe brand Babybotte popular in the 60's.
- Kimi is never seen without her unique purple cowgirl boots in Rugrats as she's adventurous and extremely fearless.
- Samurai Jack always wears a pair of wooden sandals (known as "geta" in Japanese). He's so attached to the style that there's an entire episode dedicated to them being destroyed and him trying to find a replacement pair. It also stands out in the wildly futuristic setting he's trapped in where high-tech apparel is the norm.
- SpongeBob SquarePants, as The One Who Wears Shoes (not when Sandy is wearing her suit or when Spongebob is with a minor character who also wears shoes), wears black patent leather shoes, which helps add to his dorky personality, especially with the distinctive squeaky sounds as he walks.
- When outside her treedome, Sandy herself wears space boots with her diving suit, and they make some distinctive clinking sounds as she walks.
