It’s a big day for womankind: There’s finally a flat shoe emoji, and Florie Hutchinson is the woman we all have to thank for it.
“I typed the word 'shoe,'” said Hutchinson. “Why I was texting my sister at 3 a.m. something about shoes, I don't know. But the red high-heel stiletto popped up, and I just looked at it and there was this sort of sense of disbelief.”
Disbelief because the only women’s shoe emojis are high-heeled shoes.
“I basically spent the last six years either pregnant, or breastfeeding, or pushing a baby, or carrying one on my torso,” Hutchinson said. “And so I hadn't seen the light of stilettos in about six years, and so this specific emoji just didn't resonate with me at all.”
Me neither. As I told viewers back in May, I can’t wear high heels because of my rheumatoid arthritis.
Florie and I are not alone. Even Anna Wintour was spotted in Air Jordan shoes.
The blue ballet flat she created needed to exist because emojis are our visual language.
They’re on lunchboxes, jewelry, clothing, menus, even my daughter’s wallpaper.
With ubiquity should come representation, right?
“This is the kind of a collective call to action in the same way that, you know, this 15-year-old girl in Berlin was responsible for the hijab emoji,” Hutchinson said. “She wanted a girl who looked like her and wore a head scarf, as do 550 million Muslim women.”
In the same way that Crazy Rich Asians is important, showing inclusiveness on the big screen, major magazines are also now putting sneakers on their covers.
And for this mother of now four girls, it’s personal.
"I love the idea that it's going to outlive me, for sure,” Hutchinson said. “And there's this wild statistic that I think by 2020 they predict there will be four connected devices for every human being on earth, which roughly translates to 30 billion connected devices. And so to think my little blue flat shoe is going to be on 30 billion devices is pretty cool and awesome.”