Will flats enter the emoji lexicon?
Seated on the patio of Tootsie’s cafe at Stanford, Florie Hutchinson — wearing Soludos espadrilles adorned with embroidered orange slices — is assessing the footwear of the women at neighboring tables. “You’ve got sandals, boat shoes, desert boots, ballet flats, sneakers,” she says.
There’s not a heel in sight, an observation that supports her thesis: A flat-shoe emoji is long overdue. Currently, the only shoe emoji are a highheeled boot, high-heeled mule, highheeled pump — notice a pattern here? — sneaker and brogue.
Six months ago, Hutchinson hardly ever used emoji. Now, the Palo Alto arts publicist is on the verge of becoming an official emoji creator: Her blue ballet flat may be coming soon to keyboards everywhere.
It all started with an afternoon spent with her three daughters: Eloise, 5½; Anais, 4; and Beatrice, 11 months. At the grocery store, they spotted a book titled “Polite as a Princess” — with Snow White, Belle and Ariel on the cover — and Hutchinson later wondered on Instagram when Disney would publish “Polite as a Prince.”
After the store visit, they headed across the street to a baby shop. In the baby carrier section, the packaging for 29 of the 30 products on display depicted a woman with child in tow. Only one, Norwegian brand Stokke, showed a man wearing a carrier.
The tipping point would occur later that evening, though, as Hutchinson was texting a friend in Spain. As she finished typing the word “shoe,” a fire-engine red stiletto popped up on the screen — the default emoji for a shoe.
“I had this day, surrounded by my little pack of women, and realized that everywhere I looked, I was being bombarded by these very specific genderstereotypical roles,” she recalls. “And I just stared in total disbelief at this shoe.”
If the default was a sneaker, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But a stiletto? She doesn’t own a single pair. “We need options,” Hutchinson says. “And we need emoji that a majority of women can identify with. And we need emoji that don’t sexualize the female form.”
Thus began her descent into “the Google rabbit hole,” as she puts it. Hutchinson learned that anyone can submit a proposal for an emoji to the Unicode Consortium, an industry group focused on the languages of the world, that is responsible for greenlighting new emoji.
In her submission, filed in July, Hutchinson stated her case, including an assessment of the popularity of flat shoes on social media. For example, on Instagram, she calculated that #flats and #flatshoes appeared as hashtags 5.3 million times.
Hutchinson also enlisted graphic designer Aphee Messer to devise a dozen options for the symbol. A blue version with a tidy black bow was approved for further consideration. A vote is scheduled for this week (Oct. 23), with the 2018 selections made public in November.
According to consortium member Jennifer 8. Lee, about 67 emojis will debut next year. The release date varies by company. While it can be as early as spring in some cases, Lee notes that for Apple, it’s usually November. (Lee is also the co-founder of Emojination, a grassroots organization whose motto is “Emoji by the People, for the People.”)
“What I’m hoping,” says Hutchinson, “is that women see this emoji as a reflection of their own shoe-wearing habits.”
Hutchinson is hardly alone in her no-heel crusade. When “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot promoted the box-office smash this year, she wore flat shoes on numerous occasions. For the Hollywood premiere, she donned a red, sequined Givenchy gown and a $50 pair of Aldo sandals, in an attempt to “create this trend of doing red carpets in flats,” she told a reporter.
If Hutchinson’s emoji does indeed make the final cut, she already has a follow-up in mind: a one-piece swimsuit, as an alternative to the pink-andwhite polka-dot bikini.
“I started out thinking small, which was: I don’t wear stilettos; most women don’t either,” she says. “But then things crescendoed. I started seeing these types of visual languages being used left, right and center, and realized, OK, I’ve got to think beyond the flat-shoe emoji.”