Anna May Wong’s Lucky Shoes: 1939 Australia Through the Eyes of an Art Deco Diva

Australian Architect and Senior Lecturer at Melbourne University Derham Groves just published a book of his students’ design of new shoes for the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong with Culicidae Press. Groves writes in the design brief to his students: At its best, fashion-like architecture-can be biographical. In 1939 the beautiful and intriguing Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong performed at the Tivoli Theatres in Melbourne and Sydney. […] Wong was a fashionista of her day. It appears that she was particularly fond of shoes: while in Melbourne she was photographed buying shoes at Foy’s department store and in Sydney she revealed to a reporter that a Chinese-style shoe she wore as a child and kept in her dressing-room was her lucky charm. Design and make a pair of shoes for Anna May Wong by ‘altering’ (i.e. adding to, cutting, painting, etc.) a second-hand pair of shoes purchased from an op shop. […] Hand in the shoes, along with a 200-word explanation of how they relate to Anna May Wong, on the 12th of October [2010]. Also upload an image of the shoes on the subject’s Wiki page.