Podophilia

Podophilia (pronounced podd-ah-fil-ee-uh or pod-oh-fil=ee-uh)

A paraphilia describing the sexualized objectification of feet (and sometimes footwear), commonly called foot fetishism although the correct clinical description is now "foot partialism".

1980s: The construct was podo- +‎ -philia.  Podo- (pertaining to a foot or a foot-like part) was from the Ancient Greek πούς (poús), from the primitive Indo-European pṓds.  It was cognate with the Mycenaean Greek po, the Latin pēs, the Sanskrit पद् (pad), the Old Armenian ոտն (otn) & հետ (het), the Gothic fōtus and the Old English fōt (from which Modern English gained foot).  The Greek poús was the ancient Greek and Byzantine unit of length originally based upon the length of a shod foot and the idea in Europe endured for centuries although until the seventeenth century there were little attempts at standardization, even within the one jurisdiction and although things were settled well before the twentieth century, in the legal sense it wasn't until 1959 that the US, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia and the UK signed the "International Yard and Pound Agreement" which codified avoirdupois weight and length then used in all those nations, a set (although largely supplanted by the metric system (except in the US)) which officially still defines both Imperial and US customary units.  The suffix –philia was from the From Ancient Greek φιλία (philía) (fraternal love), from φῐλέω (philéō) (to love), from the earlier Ionic Greek (where the meanings diverged somewhat over the years.  It was used to to form nouns meaning a fondness, liking or love of something and in pathology picked up the specific technical sense of abnormal liking or tendency such a paraphilia.  One with specific attraction to feet or footwear is a podophile and their predilections are described as podophilic.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

The English phrase “length of the chancellor's foot” is neither an allusion to lineal measurement nor an early example of political podophilia.  It is a critique of law and most associated with a passage by the English jurist and scholar John Selden (1584–1654) which appeared in his Table Talk (published posthumously in London in 1689), discussing the flexible, adaptable law of equity and how its administration differed from the rigid, precedent-bound courts of common law: “Equity is a roguish thing: for law we have a measure… equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is equity. ’Tis all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a 'foot' a Chancellor’s foot; what an uncertain measure would this be! One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot.”

In other words, in the Court of Chancellery, equity was administered by the Lord Chancellor at his discretion, the attraction being when the application of common law precedents were seen to create an obvious injustice, equity could intervene to provide a just result: justice based on fairness rather than strict legal rules.  However, implicit in that flexibility was the estimation of equity could vary from one Chancellor to next and thus the Court of Chancellery soon created its own contradictions, attracting critics who noted an outcome depended on the personal judgment of the Lord Chancellor who reached his decision on a “case-by-case” basis.

The Lord Chancellor with feet in flippers: Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone (Quintin Hogg, 1907-2001; Lord Chancellor 1970-1974 & 1979-1987).  Hailsham was a Tory (Conservative) but the photograph was taken by the Labour Party politician Lord Healey (Dennis Healey, 1917–2015).

The rationale was both clear and commendable but lawyers trained in the courts of common law liked the certainty and predictability of adherence to precedence; their fees were dependent on them winning their clients’ cases, not seeking an abstraction like “justice”.  Thus the phrase became legal shorthand for judicial arbitrariness in which outcomes depended on personal discretion rather than objective standards.  The equity lawyers were of course sensitive to the criticism and what evolved in the Court of Chancellery was its own set of “rules” although these came to be called “equitable maxims” and were principles & concepts which can be thought of as a kind of “proto-fuzzy law” in that they existed to ensure justice and fairness would be delivered but in a consistent manner.  The phrase however survives as a critique of subjective decision-making by authorities or inconsistencies in governance or law.

Often focused on toe cleavage, many self-described foot fetishists provide curated content.

Although the psychiatric community has since the mid-twentieth century devoted some time to discussing, re-defining and pondering what is apparently the 1800-odd year history of foot fetishism, a glance at the literature does suggest it’s been thought usually an interesting quirk in the human condition rather than a condition, much less a mental disorder.  Before the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1987 published the revised third edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R), fetishism was usually described as a persistent preferential sexual arousal in association with non-living objects or an over-inclusive focus on (typically non-sexualized) body parts (most famously feet) and body secretions.  With the DSM-III-R, the concept of partialism (an exclusive focus on part of the body) was separated from the historic category of fetishism and appended to the “Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified” category.  Although one of the dustier corners of psychiatry, the field had always fascinated some and in the years since the DSM-III-R was published, a literature did emerge, most critics maintaining partialism and fetishism are related, can be co-associated, and are non-exclusive domains of sexual behavior.  There was a technical basis for this position because introduced in DSM-IV (1994) was a (since further elaborated) codification of the secondary clinical significance criterion for designating a psychiatric disorder, one the implications of which was that it appeared to suggest a diagnostic distinction between partialism and fetishism was no longer clinically meaningful or necessary.  The recommendation was that the prime diagnostic criterion for fetishism be modified to reflect the reintegration of partialism and that a fetishistic focus on non-sexual body parts be a specifier of Fetishism.

Lohanic footage: Lindsay Lohan’s feet, the right plantar flexing (left), the left dorsiflexing (right).  Wikifeet's expert critics rate Ms Lohan's feet at 4½ stars (beautiful feet); her page has 3653 images.

Fetish was from the Latin facere (to make) which begat factitious (made by art), from which the Portuguese feitico was derived (fetiche in the French), from which English gained fetish.  A fetish in this context was defined as "a thing irrationally revered; an object in which power or force was concentrated".  In English, use of fetish to indicate an object of desire in the sense of “someone who is aroused due to a body part, or an object belonging to a person who is the object of desire” dates from 1897 (although the condition is mentioned in thirteenth century medical documents), an era during which the language of modern psychiatry was being assembled.  However, the earliest known literary evidence of podophilia lies in dozens of brooding, obsessive love letters from the second century AD of uncertain authorship and addressed to both male and female youths.  That there are those to whom an object or body part has the power to captivate and enthral has presumably been part of the human condition from the start.

Suspected podophiles, parked outside shoe shop.

From the beginnings of modern psychiatry, such a focus was not in itself considered a disorder, unless accompanied by distress or impairment although it was noted by many that if even a nominally “harmless” fetish became an obsession, it certainly could impair healthy sexuality.  In DSM-5 (2013), the diagnosis was assigned to individuals who experience sexual arousal from objects or a specific part of the body which is not typically regarded as erotic and presumably any body part or object can be a fetish, the most frequently mentioned including underwear, shoes, stockings, gloves, hair and latex.   Fetishists may use the desired article for sexual gratification in the absence of a partner although it’s recorded this may involve nothing more than touching smelling the item and the condition appears to manifest almost exclusively in men, the literature suggesting a quarter of fetishistic men are homosexual but caution needs always to be attached to these numbers.  Because fetishism is something which many happily enjoy their whole adult lives, it never comes to the attention of doctors and a high proportion of the statistical material about fetishism is from patients self-reporting.  The statistics in a sense reflect thus not the whole cohort of the population with the condition but rather those who either want to talk about it or are responding to surveys.  That is of course true of other mental illnesses but is exaggerated with fetishism because so much lies with the spectrum of normal human behavior and the definitional limitations in the DSM-5 reflect this, including three criteria for Fetishistic Disorder and three specifiers:

Criterion 1: Over a six month period, the individual has experienced sexual urges focused on a non-genital body part, or inanimate object, or other stimulus, and has acted out urges, fantasies, or behaviors.

Criterion 2: The fantasies, urges, or behaviors cause distress, or impairment in functioning.

Criterion 3: The fetishized object is not an article of clothing employed in cross dressing, or a sexual stimulation device, such as a vibrator.

Specifiers for the diagnosis include the type of stimulus which is the focus of attention (1) the non-genital or erogenous areas of the body (famously feet) and this condition is known also as Partialism (a preoccupation with a part of the body rather than the whole person), (2) Non-living object(s) (such as shoes), (3) specific activities (such as smoking during sex).

Not AOC’s feet.

The foot particularists also do PSAs (public service announcements).  When an image of feet was posted to Instagram with a caption claiming they belonged to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC, b 1989, US Representative (Democrat-New York) since 2019 and one of "the squad"), the alleged foot-selfie was lent a whiff of scandal by their owner being in the bath, holding a vape with a bottle of pumpkin-scented shampoo nearby.  Quickly the story was debunked by the online foot fetishists at WikiFeet, the internet’s most comprehensive collection of pictures of women's feet.  In this case, Ms Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Wikifeet page was used to C&C (compare and contrast) against the images in their library and it wasn’t a difficult task for the Wikifeet experts because the toes in the image were mildly brachydactyly (an inherited trait whereby the bones of the digits are relatively short) whereas AOC’s are not so afflicted.  Wikifeet’s users rate AOC’s feet at “3.92 stars” (nice feet), based on the 83 images in her page (many in sandals but some daringly bare).  Further research by the Wikifeet particularists revealed the feet surfacing provocatively from the pink bath-water really belonged to Sydney Leathers (b 1991) who became even better known by parlaying the publicity she attracted for being the sexting partner of disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner (b 1964) into an apparently brief career as an aspiring porn star.  Why that didn’t flourish isn’t clear because rarely has there been a better porn star name than "Sydney Leathers" and Australian fellmongers and fetishists alike missed a marketing opportunity there.

Gianvito Rossi 85 suede pumps, US$1,210 at net-a-porter.

Noting the definitional model in the DSM-IV-TR (2000), despite the history in psychiatry’s world of paraphilias and a notable presence in popular culture, there were those who claimed the very notion of a foot fetish was false because of that critical phrase “non-living” which would seem to disqualify a foot (unless of course it was no longer alive but such an interest would be seriously weird and a different condition; although in this context there are deconstructionists who would make a distinction between a depiction of a live foot and the foot itself, clinicians probably regard them as interchangeable tools of the fetishist although the techniques of consumption would vary).  The critic noted many fetishes are extensions of the human body, such as articles of clothing or footwear but that did not extend to feet and that diagnostically, a sexual fascination with feet did correctly belong in the category of “Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified,” and thus be regarded as partialism: Foot partialism.

Design by Davina-India.  Although the extreme examples won’t be possible to render as practical products without (unanticipated) advances in materials, 3D printing offers possibilities for the shoe-oriented faction of the foot partialists.

It was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who admitted that, lawfulness aside, as animals, the only truly aberrant sexual behavior in humans could be said to be its absence (something which the modern asexual movement re-defines rather than disproves).  It seemed to be in that spirit the DSM-5 was revised to treat podophila and many other “harmless” behaviors as “normal” and thus within the purview of the manual only to the extent of being described, clinical intervention no longer required.  Whether all psychiatrists agree with the new permissiveness isn’t known but early reports suggest there’s nothing in the DSM-5-TR (2022) to suggest podophiles will soon again be labeled as deviants.

Most Beautiful Ankle competition, Hounslow, England, 1936. What such competitions did was “level the playing field” to ensure a woman was judged only on the body-part being assessed, the rest of her concealed behind a screen so a judge wouldn't be influenced by “extraneous aspects”.

The matter of podophilia is not exactly a neglected field but beyond the particularists it’s a niche topic for study, probably because despite being often curated as collections of images of objectified, un-clothed body parts, the stuff inherently is SFW (suitable for work) so is not as controversial as some fetishes.  Indeed, even were someone found to be in possession of many images of the feet of minors, unless the circumstances were unusual and disclosed suspicion of other behaviours, it’s likely no offence has been committed.  There have though been some academic studies including Sexualization of the Female Foot as a Response to Sexually Transmitted Epidemics: A Preliminary Study (1998) by A. James Giannini, Andrew E. Slaby, Gale Colapietro, Steven M. Melemis & Rachel K. Bowman.  A review of historic literature, the authors hypothesized a relationship between epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases and foot fetishism, the research prompted by an exponential increase in the behaviour seen in the 1980s, before AIDS had been listed as a pandemic.

Most Beautiful Legs competition, Palisades Amusement Park, New York, 1951.  Note the judge crouching to achieve the perfect angle, presumably a podophile with a well-trained eye.

The paper noted that during the second millennium there have been four major epidemics of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases, then the preferred term for what are now classed as STIs (sexually transmitted infections)): (1) what’s believed to have been an outbreak of gonorrhoea in the thirteenth century, syphilis in (2) the sixteenth and (3) nineteenth and (4) AIDS in the late twentieth and during each “there seemed to emerge a sexual focus on the female foot” which “disappeared with the epidemic's subsidence, usually after 30-60 years.”  What was intriguing was “the focus on feet was unique to each of these epidemic periods” whereas in all other eras studied, “eroticism was attached to breasts, buttocks and thighs.”  It was not suggested feet (bare or otherwise) didn’t appear in Biblical, Egyptian or Classical art and literature but they were not depicted as “sexual foci”.

It was in the thirteenth century things began to change as romantic writings came to include paeans to women's feet and the details were often not metaphorical but anatomical, describing in loving admiration the “aesthetically idealized woman's foot” which was to be “narrow with high arches.  The toes were to be somewhat long with no ‘webbing’ or folds of skin in between.  The great toe was longer than the second toe. The nails were to be elongated with large white moons and pale-pink nail-beds.”  The perfect foot was expected to be “white on both plantar and ventral aspects” so clearly, like thighs, buttocks and breasts, women’s feet were expected to conform to what men had decided was “beautiful” and those with body parts outside the “standardized image” could not be beautiful. Plus ça change…

Most Beautiful Ankle competition, Cliftonville open air swimming pool, Margate, England, 1936.

The Church looked askance at this “new” fetish, damning it as a “further form of degeneracy as Europe” and though the paper finds the trend faded to oblivion with the end of what is now believed to have been an epidemic of gonorrhoea, with the outbreak of syphilis in the sixteenth century, there appears again a “near-simultaneous reappearance of the foot fetish” which began in southern Europe before spreading north and the art of the time suggests it was then “toe-cleavage” was first identified as a motif, as a “voyeuristic mark of this time period as decolletage for other generations”.  Interestingly, 300-odd years on, the ideal structure was re-imagined and an “elongated second toe” became suddenly fashionable.  When syphilis re-appeared in the 1800s, so did the focus on women’s feet and because photography was available to the Victorians, there’s a record also of the reaction of polite society with the female foot “removed from photographic tintypes”: While men’s boots commonly remained exposed, women's boots or shoes were either covered with fabric or “mechanically cropped from the plate”.  Ballerinas would perform bare-footed (critics writing of her feet as they “flexed and extended”) ice-cream confections (called the “Trilby”) were sold in the shape of a woman’s foot and the “Cinderella fairy tale was revived with foot fetishistic overtones not now reflected in twentieth century versions”.  

Sometimes, statistical methods are purely lineal: Technicians recording (in metrics) the metrics of a contestant in Miss Italia, Rome, 1949.

“Body part” contests offered scope for those who wouldn’t be “competitive” in mainstream beauty contests.  As a footnote, the perfection (in the sense of digital depiction) of generative AI (artificial intelligence) may see the end of the industry’s “body part model” niche in which those with exceptional hands, feet, eyes etc were contracted for photo-shoots involving just that one part.

In the nineteenth century, some did offer explanations (sometimes fanciful) for the phenomenon and although in the medical literature there were observations of the use of the foot “as a safe-sex alternative”, no systematic studies seem to have been undertaken.  The AIDS pandemic revived the interest and the proliferation of foot-fetish publications in the 1980s (before the internet was a mainstream product) was a marker of the trend and interestingly, the titles of what were usually glossy magazines avoided the words “feet” & “foot”, instead using “neutral” terms such as “Leg Action, Thigh High, Leg Show, Leg-Scene, High-heeled Women, Silk Stockings or Leg Tease”.

Highly qualified content provider Busty Buffy (b 1996), whose feet seem never to command the attention they deserve.

Despite that, the content seems overwhelmingly foot-centric and the conclusion was the publishers wished to “avoid embarrassment for the purchaser”.  That was interesting in that publications devoted to other body parts seemed to tend to use unambiguous titles and the paradox was that although feet were SWF, the perception was there was shame attached to the predilection, something not suffered by consumers of the definitely NSFW (not suitable for work) breast-related material.  Editorially, there were photographs mostly including feet and tips & techniques for “foot sex” which could be “a pleasurable sexual alternative without risk of sexually transmitted diseases”, the foot described as a safe “erotic alternative to the anus and genitals”.  It was at this point even the mainstream magazines began to advocate “toe sucking” and “foot biting” between couples, not to avoid infections but because for even the most sexually jaded it would be a “genuinely new” experience, novelty in this field much valued.  Diligent washing prior to sucking and biting was recommended.

First heat of Miss Slender Legs Competition, Miami, Florida, 1952.  Many good things happen in Florida; everybody knows that.

The pop band The Monks in 1979 released the single Nice Legs Shame About Her Face so the contest in Miami was really an early example of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion).  It's a bit of a stretch but as a Lord Chancellor might have put it, "beauty contests" are a thing of the common law while the "most beautiful body part" competitions belong to equity. 

The AIDS pandemic of course remains afoot although advances in treatment have made it manageable for most, at least in developed economies though there are concerns how cuts to foreign aid will affect outcomes in poorer regions, especially sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific islands.  Despite the the condition fading from public consciousness, foot particularism appears still to be flourishing, the absence of foot-focused print titles an indication of the general industry shift to digital content rather than any decline in interest and the count of related internet pages is said to be in the millions.  To explain the phenomenon which has for centuries re-occurred, the neurology community has also become involved.  In Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (1998), neurologist V.S. Ramachandran (b 1991) and science journalist Sandra Blakeslee (b 1943) offered the theory of a link with brain areas for the feet and the genitals being physically close, their speculation being there may be some “neural crosstalk between the two”, the idea a concern about STIs induces the brain to be stimulated to think about feet, purely because of the effect of directly adjacent electrical activity.

Croissant

Croissant (pronounced krwah-sahn (French), kruh-sahnt (barbarians) or cross-ant (savages)

A rich, buttery, often crescent-shaped, roll of leavened dough or puff paste.

1899:  From the French croissant (crescent), present participle of the verb croître (to increase, to grow), from the Middle French croistre, from the Old French creistre derived from the Classical Latin crēscēns & crēscentem, present active infinitive of crēscō (I augment), drawn from the Proto-Italic krēskō. The ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European ḱreh (to grow, become bigger).  Correct pronunciation here.  Chefs & bakers have found the word adaptable when inventing pasteries, coining croffle (croissant-waffle hybrid), cronut (a croissant-doughnut hybrid), cruffin (a croissant-muffin hybrid) and doissant (an alternative name for a cronut).  Croissant is a noun and croissantlike is an adjective; the noun plural is croissants.  

The Austrian Pastry

Like some other cultural artefacts thought quintessentially French (French fries invented in Belgium; Nicolas Sarkozy (b 1955; French president 2007-2012) from here and there; the Citroën DS (1955-1975) styled by an Italian) the croissant came from elsewhere, its origins Austrian, the Viennese kipferl a crescent-shaped sweet made plain, with nuts or other fillings.  It varies from the French classic in being denser and less flaky, made with softer dough.  First noted in the thirteenth century at which time, it was thought a “sweet” it was another three-hundred years before it came to be regarded as a morning pastry.  Tastes changed as new techniques of baking evolved and around the turn of the seventeenth century, recipes began to appear in Le Pâtissier François using Pâte feuilletée (puff pastry), these being the first recognisably modern croissants.

A classic butter croissant with a long black coffee (Caffè Americano).

Culinary histories include a number of (likely apocryphal) tales of why the croissant adopted a crescent shape.  One suggests it was baked first in Buda to celebrate the defeat of the Ummayyad (the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) was the second of the four major caliphates created after the death of the prophet Muhammad (circa 570-632)) forces by the Franks in the Battle of Tours (732), the shape representing the Islamic crescent moon although more famous is the notion it was designed after the battle of 1683 when the Ottomans were turned back from the gates of Vienna.  A baker, said to have heard the Turks tunneling under the walls of the city as he lit his ovens to bake the morning bread, sounded an alarm, and the defending forces collapsed the tunnel, saving the city.   To celebrate, bread was baked in the shape of the crescent moon of the Turkish flag.

Portrait of Marie Antoinette (1755–1793; Queen of France 1774-1792) (1769), oil on canvas by Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802).

The official title of the portrait was Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria and it was created as the era’s equivalent of a Tinder profile picture, the artist summoned in 1769 to Vienna to paint a pleasing rendering of the young lady the Hapsburg royal court planned to marry off to Louis, Dauphin of France (1754-1973) who would reign as Louis XVI (King of France 1774-1792)).  Tinder profile pictures can be misleading (some pounds and even more years sometimes vanishing) so the work must be considered in that context although she was barely fourteen when she sat so it may be true to the subject.  Ducreux’s portrait was the first glimpse the prince had of his intended bride and it must have been pleasing enough for him metaphorically to "swipe right" and the marriage lasted until the pair were executed with the blade of the guillotine.  As a reward, Ducreux was raised to the nobility as a seigneur de la baronnie (lord of the barony, the grade of of baron granted to roturiers (commoners)) and appointed premier peintre de la reine (First Painter to the Queen), outliving the royal couple.

Rendered by Vovsoft as cartoon character: a brunette Lindsay Lohan in croissant T-shirt.

A more romantic tale attributes the pastry to Marie Antoinette, who, as an Austrian, preferred the food of her homeland to that of the French court and, at state dinners, would sneak off to enjoy pastries and coffee.  There is no documentary evidence for her having re-christened the kipferl as the croissant but the story is she so missed what she knew as kipfel (German for crescent) that she commanded the royal baker to clone the treat.  More prosaic, but actually verified by historical evidence, is that August Zang (1807-1888), a retired Austrian artillery officer founded a Viennese Bakery in Paris in 1839 and most food historians agree he is the one most likely to have introduced the kipfel to France, a pastry that later inspired French bakers to create crescents of their own.  The first mention of the croissant in French is in French chemist Anselme Payen’s (1795-1871) Des Substances alimentaires (1853), published long after Marie-Antoinette’s time in court, the first known printed recipe, using the name, appearing in Swiss chef Joseph Favre’s (1849-1903) Dictionnaire universel de cuisine (1905) although even that was a more dense creation than the puffy thing known today.

Once were croissants: 1967 Mercedes-Benz 600 (with Biskuitrolles (jam rolls) or Nackenrolles (neck rolls), left), 1969 Mercedes-Benz 600 (with “croissants” or “rabbits ears”, centre) and 1990 Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL (with boring “headrests”, right).

Mercedes-Benz introduced their Kopfstütze (literally “head support” although in the factory’s technical documents the design project was the Kopfstützensystem (head restraint system)) when the 600 (W100, 1963-1981) was displayed at the 1963 Frankfurt Motor Show, the early cars having only a rear-pair as standard equipment (there was an expectation many 600s would be chauffeur-driven) with the front units optional but the hand-built 600 could be ordered with one, two, three or four Kopfstützen (or even none although no 600s seem to have been ordered so-configured).  In 1969 the design was updated and over three weeks the new type was phased in for the models then in production.  While a totally new design (one cognizant of the US safety regulations which had mandated them for the front seats of passenger vehicles) with a different internal structure and mounting assembly, the most distinctive aspect was the raised sides which some compared to the “pagoda” roof then in use on the W113 (230, 250 & 280 SL, 1963-1971) roadster but this was coincidental.  In the early press reports the shapes were described with culinary references, the previous versions said to resemble a Biskuitrolle mit Marmelade (jam filled sponge roll) while the new generation was more like a croissant.  In the English-speaking world, neither term caught on, the older style was called something like “older style” while the new came to be known as “rabbits ears” which was much more charming.  Uncharmed, the humorless types at the factory continued to call them teilt (split) or offener Rahmen (open-frame).  The “rabbits ears” were phased out in 1979 although the low volume 600 retained them (along with the archaic rear swing-axles!) until the last was built in 1981.  The design introduced in 1979 seems never to have been compared to any kind of food and it reverted to lateral symmetry although the structure was noticeably more vertiginous.

The factory may have described them as Kopfstützensystem (head restraint system, a pair in red leather to the left) but as well as the jam roll allusion, people also called them Nackenrolles (literally “neck roll”, centre) which were cylindrical pillows designed to support the head and neck when the user was seated.  Long a fixture in the catalogues of interior decorators, they gained a new popularity when televisions became a standard feature in houses and remain available although much modern furniture is now designed with head-support “built-in”.  Modern commerce adopted the term Nackenrolle (often without the initial capital when advertised in English-speaking markets) to cater to one growth market of the late twentieth century: frequent flyers and those on long haul flights.  These included shapes ranging from a simple horseshoe to “wrap-around” items (right) and some which enveloped almost the entire head in a supportive padded surround, an aperture to allow breathing through the nose and mouth the only gap (resembling the once perpetually doomed Kenny McCormick in the animated TV series South Park on Paramount's Comedy Central cable channel).

Depending on this & that, it's a jam roll, Swiss jam roll, jelly roll or Biskuitrolle.

Quick & simple to make and adaptable to a range of variants, the jam roll is a classic European sweet treat; usually it’s served sliced.  In some English-speaking markets, commonly they’re sold as a “Swiss Jam Roll”, thus the not unreasonable assumption it was bakers in Switzerland who invented the things but although the documentary evidence is sketchy, it’s clear from surviving cookbooks they were a common creation, rolled sponge cakes appearing across Central and Western Europe by at least the early eighteenth century.  However, the first known instance of the term “Swiss Jam Roll” in print was in England in the 1850s and that was as a marketing ploy; “Viennese”, “Danish”, or “French” often used as “prestige adjectives” because of the deservedly high reputation of the cakes and pastries served in Parisian & Viennese cafés, English cuisine not enjoying such high repute.  The term “Swiss Jam Roll” certainly caught on although the roll (or roulade) is very much a generic rolled sponge cake and between European cities there would have been little local variation.  In the US, they came to be known as “jelly rolls” because there what the English called “jam” was dubbed jelly and the Germans called them Biskuitrolles.  That makes curious the US use of “biscuit” to mean a kind of soft, semi-sweet or savory bread (something like an English scone) whereas what the English call “biscuits”, the Americans call “cookies”.  That does hint what the German immigrants to North America used for their Biskuitrolles may have been less sweet than the classic sponge cake used in the modern versions.  As a footnote, in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956), Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) listed “jam” as “non-U” (ie not the word used by the upper classes) while “preserves” (always in the plural) was the “U” form.  Despite that, in class-conscious England, there appears to be no record of “preserve rolls”. Swiss or otherwise so either it was classless food or the toffs just forgave the name and enjoyed the treat.

Petit-déjeuner à Paris: café; croissant; Gauloises.

In 2025, for some to enjoy the pleasure of a croissant at breakfast began to demand a little more planning after the French government banned the smoking of cigarettes in all outdoor areas where children can be present (US$130 on-the-spot fine).  Vaping was still allowed (!) so there was that and terrasses (the outdoor areas of coffee shops bars) were exempt.  While inhaling a known carcinogen is not good and should be discouraged, the odd concession such as allowing consenting adults together to enjoy a coffee and cigarette does seem a worthwhile tribute civilization can pay to the irrational.  It's good Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) & Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) didn't live to see this day. 

Although the famous shape is much admired, for purists, the choice is always the un-curved croissant au beurre, (butter croissant), the more eye-catching crescents being usually the ordinaires, made with margarine.  The taste in the English-speaking world for things like ham-and-cheese croissants is regarded by the French as proof of Anglo-Saxon barbarism although they will tolerate a sparse drizzle of chocolate if it’s for children and food critics reluctantly concede the almond croissant (with a frangipane filling, topped with slivered almonds and a dusting of powdered sugar) is “…enjoyed by younger women”.  Generally though, the French stick to the classics, eschewing even butter, a croissant being best enjoyed unadorned and taken with a strong black coffee and while some will insist this should be accompanied with a Gitanes, that is optional.

The cube croissant, an Instagram favorite.

Although much focused upon, the shape of a croissant of course becomes less relevant when eaten when the experience becomes one of taste and texture.  For that reason the pastry used has long attracted those chefs for whom food offers architectural possibilities and while for more than a century one-offs have been created for competition and special event, in recent years the phenomenon of social media has been a design stimulant, Instagram, TikTok etc fuelling a culinary arms race and patisseries have built (sometimes short-lived) product lines in response to viral videos.  Fillings have of course been a feature but it’s the shapes which have been most eye-catching (and by extension click-catching which is the point for the content providers). There have been “croissants” in the shape of spheres, discs, pyramids, spirals, wedges and cubes, the last among the more amusing with chefs referencing objects and concepts such as dice, cubist art and, of course, the Rubik’s Cube.  Many have been just a moment while some have for a while trended.

Dominique Ansel's Cronut, stacked and sliced.

Some have endured for longer such as the Cronut (the portmanteau’s construct being cro(issant) + (dough)nut) and so serious was New York based French pastry chef Dominique Ansel (b 1978) that in 2013 he trademarked his creation.  In the familiar shape of a doughnut, the composition was described as “a croissant-like pastry with a filling of flavored cream and fried in grapeseed oil.”  Interviewed by Murdoch tabloid the New York Post, the chef revealed it took “two months of R&D (research & development)” before the Cronut was perfected and the effort was clearly worthwhile because after being released in his eponymous bakery in Manhattan’s SoHo neighbourhood, the city’s food bloggers (a numerous and competitive population) responded and within days photographs circulated of dozens waiting for opening time, a reaction which prompted the application to the US Patent and Trademark Office.  In the way of such things, around the planet “clones”, “tributes”, “knock-offs”, “imitations”, “rip-offs” (the descriptions as varied as the slight changes in the recipes introduced presumably to fend off a C&D (cease and desist letter)) soon appeared.  Predictably, some were called “Doughssants” (the Germanic eszett a nice touch) although others were less derivative.

Rupert Murdoch's (b 1931) New York Post, 16 August, 2022.

Monsieur Ansel in 2015 released Dominique Ansel: The Secret Recipes, a cookbook which included the Cronut recipe and the thing in its authentic form was clearly for the obsessives, the instructions noting making one or a batch was a three-day process.  In its review of the year, Time magazine nominated the Cronut as one of the “best inventions of 2013”, prompting one cultural commentator (another species which proliferates in New York City) to observe the decadence of the West had reached the point the breakdown of society was close.  There may have been something in the idea the new “Visigoths at the Gates of Rome” were actually pastry chefs because in the wake of the Cronut the city was soon flooded with all sorts of novel sugary treats, mostly elaborations of croissants, doughnuts and, it being NYC, bagels.  By 2022 the New York Post was prepared to proclaim: “Move over cronuts! NYC's hot new baked good is the Suprême”, the defenestrator from Noho’s Lafayette Grand Café and revealed to be a “unique circular croissant filled with pastry crème and topped with ganache and crushed up cookies.”  Again of the Instagram & TikTok age, queues were reported even though at a unit cost of US$8.50 it was two dollars more expensive than a Cronut, the price of which had increased fairly modestly since 2013 when it debuted at US$5.00.

All the recent variations on the croissant are built on the theme chefs have for centuries understood is the easy path to popularity: FSS; add fat, salt & sugar, the substances mankind has for millennia sought.  Once it took much effort (and often some risk) to find these things but now they’re conveniently packaged and widely available at prices which, although subject to political and economic forces, remain by historic standards very cheap.  Often, we don’t even need to seek out the packages because so much of the preparation and distribution of food has been outsourced to specialists, mostly industrial concerns but the artisans persist in niches.  That’s certainly true of the croissant, few making their own whether basic or embellished and one of the latest of the croissant crazes is FSS writ large: the crookie.

Miss Sina's crookie (without added topping or powered sugar).

A crookie is a croissant stuffed with chocolate chip cookie dough and its very existence will be thought particularly shameful by some Parisian purists because it was first sold in December 2023 by the Boulangerie Louvard, located on Rue de Châteaudun in Paris’s 9^th arrondissement which, in an Instragram post announced the arrival: “Our pure butter croissant, awarded the seventh best croissant in the Île-de-France region in 2022, is made every morning with a 24-hour fermented milk sourdough and layered with Charente butter.  For our cookie dough, we use one of the best and purest chocolates in the world, from @xoco.gourmet.”  Offered originally in a test batch to test the market, the boulangerie soon announced “The concept was well received, so we're keeping it.  Available every day in-store!”

Unlike a Cronut which (at least in its pure form) demands three days to make, the charm of the crookie is its elegant simplicity and Instagrammers quickly deconstructed and posted the instructions:

(1) With a serrated knife, cut open a croissant lengthwise, leaving a “hinge” at the back.

(2) Add 2-3 tablespoons of your chocolate chip cookie dough (from a packet or home-made).

(3) Close the two sections of croissant wholly encasing the dough.

(4) When the dough is almost cooked (time will vary according to oven and the volume of dough but it takes only a few minutes), remove from oven.

(5) Add more cookie dough to the top of croissant and return to the oven for final bake.

(6) When the outside is crispy and the centre gooey, remove from oven and top with a dusting of powdered sugar.

Some crookie critics don't recommend either adding the second lashing of dough or the powered sugar because they tend to "overwhelm" the croissant and limit the surface area, thereby denying the dish some of the essential crispiness.  

The croissant in fashion

Louis Vuitton Croissant (2001) and Loop (2021).

While a handbag lends itself well to the shape of a crescent, it does inherently limit the efficiency of space utilization but this aspect is often not a primary goal in the upper reaches of the market.  With garments however, although actually a common component because the shape makes all sorts of engineering possible such as the underwire of the bra or other constructions where any sort of cantilever effect is demanded, it’s usually just an element rather than a design motif.  As a playful touch, a distinctive crescent moon or croissant might appear on a T-shirt or scarf but it’s rare to see a whole garment pursue the theme although they have appeared on the catwalks where they attract the usual mix of admiration and derision.  The original Louis Vuitton Croissant was introduced early in the twenty-first century and although modest compared with some of the company's designs, it proved to be one of the "goldilocks" bags in that it was for many just the right size and shape; now discontinued, it's still in demand through the vibrant after-market channels, fine examples selling for well-above their original list price.  Louis Vuitton must have noted the appeal because in 2021 the Loop was released, designed by Nicolas Ghesquière (b 1971) for the Cruise 2022 Collection.  The Loop was described as a "half-moon baguette" and and is closer to a crescent than the earlier bag which was in the shape of a classic butter croissant.  Some might find the fussiness in the Loop over-detailed but markets east of Suez are now important and the added bling in the detailing reflects modern consumer preferences.

SJP (Sarah Jessica Parker; b 1965) in "croissant dress" (left) and a HD (heavy duty) PVC (polyvinyl chloride) dishwashing glove in action (right).

Occasionally, catwalk creations escape and are seen in the wild.  In 2022, the actor Sarah Jessica Parker appeared in HBO's (Home Box Office) And Just Like That (2021-2022; a revival of the Sex and the City TV series (1998-2004)), wearing an orange Valentino Haute Couture gown from the house’s spring/summer 2019 collection.  It recalled a large croissant, the piece chosen presumably because the scene was set in Paris although it must have been thought viewers needed the verisimilitude laid on with a trowel because also prominent was a handbag in the shape of the Eifel Tower.  A gift to the meme-makers, while comments were numerous, admiration for the dress seemed restrained although many were taken by what at first glance appeared to be a pair of PVC (also available in latex) dishwashing gloves in a fetching pink (closer to hot pink than fashion fuchsia); few critics doubted they really were opera gloves from Valentino Haute Couture.