THE allure of couture is one things, fascination with footwear another – both are a shoo-in for visitor numbers.

Who better to follow last year's St Laurent blockbuster than Louboutin and others of his ilk, including Manolo Blahnik, Vivienne Westwood and Jimmy Choo?

This dazzling exhibition of shoes by contemporary designers and pairs from past centuries – even distant millennia – comes from the VA in London. Bowes is the only venue in the UK before it sets off on an international tour.

Extraordinary designs display all manner of excess and ostentation, often signalling triumph of vanity over taste, from feathers on winter boots to crystals on evening sandals, gold platforms to fur mules, dangerously high heels to perilous cantilevered constructions with so-called floating heels, which means no heel at all.

The exhibition examines our complex relationship with shoes and illustrates there is little that is new under the sole of the foot.

A late 1st century statuette depicts Aphrodite in platform sandals not dissimilar to Westwood's, who also comes close to emulating the height of flip flops worn by a high class Japanese prostitute to help negotiate muddy streets.

An eastern merchant's slippers with extended coiled toe about a foot long is placed near 20th century men's gold shoes studded with gem-like stones. Both scream wealth, status and self-importance.

An interesting section on the craft of shoe-making, from pencil design to finished article via layers of cut-out shapes, ends with Louboutin's Hot Chick in glossy canary yellow with heels pitched so high walking is unwise.

Pinched toes and aching arches are not the same as disfigurement caused by bound feet, represented by a tiny silken Chinese slipper, but modern woman, freed from constraints of corset and crinoline, may wonder why she chooses to hobble herself.

It's about feeling sexy and trendy, of course, at the top of our game. It always has been. Plus ca change, plus ca meme shoes, as they don't quite say in Paris, though well they might.

The exhibition runs until October 9.

Pru Farrier