It was on one of the many occasion when I had shamelessly allowed one film to merge tutorial who was baffled by the not-quite-2000 contributing. And remember what Joel from want to become a Blue, an Oxford Union hack or into another – thanks to Netflix’s dangerous automatic countdown – that I contemplated what life would be like without films. Despite the unopened tabs of historical articles that I should be reading glaring at me, I was able to convince myself that all films were educational and without them I would be lost in a term at Oxford.

Morgan Freeman offers some wise words in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living, or get busy dying”. I find this straight-talking insightful nugget incredibly reassuring when I realise it is Balliol Bar’s infamous Crazy Tuesday and decide tequila is a really good idea when my deadline is the following morning. Blowing off steam, guzzling some cheesy chips and waking up with a sore head have personally given me the impetus to get the work done. Simply because I want to go back to bed, take some paracetamol and sleep my troubles away. It gets done and I nod appreciatively at the stamp still plastered on my wrist with the knowledge that I am now a legend – albeit a tired, but happy, one.

Admittedly the essay gets done, but it does not mean it always gets done well. If I was deprived of Gene Wilder and his eccentric top hat growing up, I would never have been able to deal with criticism. Willy Wonka assures us that “a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.” I feel this statement alone can confound the expert in the field sitting opposite you in a tutorial who was baffled by the not-quite-2000 words your handed in. Sharing is caring and surely any ideas, however hair-brained, still count. Throw in some wise nods and a couple of squints whilst tapping your fingers together in contemplation and the illusion is complete. It also dismisses any inner chastising during the feedback when I realise I know very little and my tutor has spied the faint mark of a RETOX stamp on my wrist. Also, let us not forget that Willy Wonka had his own chocolate factory, and let’s face it, it worked out for him.

As the tutorial progresses, you realise that your bibliography is not as long as it should be. You are sickened by your tutorial partner who is a genius and you feel that, for the sake of common decency, it is their moral obligation to carry you through the impossible questions. Mimicking Vizzini from The Princess Bride cawing ‘inconceivable’ is an excellent tactic in these situations. One word answers, or one word agreements with your tutorial partner’s infinitely superior and perfectly formed retort, can genuinly save the day. You are still tehcnically contirbuting. And remember what Joel from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind taught you: “Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating.” Less is definitely more. It is completely legitimate to create a persona for yourself as the quiet, contemplating brooder.

If you managed to resist signing up to anything at OUSU’s Freshers Fair you possess both wisdom and steeliness, and in which case, you must be applauded for ‘outstanding moral fibre’. If, like the rest of us, you are pressured by freebies and happy people quoting Pixar’s Up telling you “adventure is out there” (despite being representatives for the crossword society), you will realise that there is a sizeable chance that by the end of the termyou will look like the love child of Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events and Gollum. Every minute of your day becomes accounted for. However, if I had not have laughed my way through Zoolander, I would never have been inspired by his quest. “I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is. Deciding you want a Blue, an Oxford Union hack or the greatest thespian of the day somehow make the adjectives ‘haggard’, ‘unwell’ and ‘dreadful’ a little easier to bear. Am I right?

It is in my all-time favourite film that I feel the best piece of advice for surviving Oxford can be found. When Joey E Brown turns to an apologetic de-wigged Jack Lemmon at the close of Some Like it Hot and responds with “nobody’s perfect”, the world suddenly comes into perspective. Sure, by Fifth Week everyone is exhausted, grouchy and maybe a little bit quick to defend or offend. If I had never heard Osgood’s up-beat honesty I do believe I would respond to situ- ations negatively and take things a lot more personally. We all find labs confusing, essay word counts impossible and lectures a bit daunting sometimes. We all forget to do our washing, survive on little sleep and sometimes feel like giving up. It is reassuring to remember every one of us is in the same boat, trying to make sense of it all and willing to help each other through. Suddenly, a rainy day in November becomes just that little bit
brighter.

It’s a matter of personal expression. The legions of women in their knee-high Hunter boots avoiding the rain in the most fashionable of ways. Work boots, casually resting below the hipster’s cuffed jeans. Those beautiful brown leather loafers for the highbrow professionals. The immortal symbol of fashion and cool that are Chuck Taylors. If you want to make a statement, shoes are the way to do it. But this level of personal choice is not the universal story of footwear. Far from it, actually. For centuries, shoes were a distinguishing symbol of class; dividing society into neat, easily identifiable groups.

Looking back to prehistory, the best evidence suggests people shod themselves in leather or animal skins to keep their feet safe. The iceman Ötzi, an amazingly well-preserved hunter-gather believed to have lived around 3300 BCE, wore sophisticated, two-part shoes with leather and fur to keep his feet warm.

But civilisational change and domestication caused a paradigm shift. As social structure stratified and wealth became more concentrated, clothing became the easiest way to distinguish the classes. In Egypt, you had to remove your shoes around someone of better social standing than yourself, and only the elites could wear highly decorated sandals or, oddly, ones with upturned toes. Greece didn’t have the same amount of stratification, but the elites did wear more “For the working class, shoes remained a matter of utility” decorative and elaborate sandals than the commoners. Unsurprisingly, the destitute often went barefoot. Ancient Rome really caught its stride with social stratification in clothing: sumptuary laws meant slaves and senators, plebeians and patricians all wore different clothing. Red boots were for senators, basic shoes for the patricians, and wooden shoes for the poorest of the free people, while slaves predictably went barefoot.

As the Middle Ages took shape, social elites wore shoes of velvet, silk and myriad other beautiful fabrics, often adorned with class-defining gold and jewels. Peasants, because of law or poverty, wore simple leather shoes designed with nothing but the utility of safety and warmth in mind. Meanwhile, poulaines — long-toed shoes popular among the upper echelons of society — came on the scene, too, and by the Renaissance, this pointy piece of footgear was the standard for society’s elite. For those with a loftier fashion sense, chopines — platform shoes that rose 20 or 30 inches into the air — were so impractical that wearers often needed servants just to help them stand. In fact, these shoes destroyed the feet of the wearer in excruciating ways, serv- ing no purpose beyond displaying wealth and fashion. Yet, as if the uncomfortable nature of the shoes was not enough of a discouragement, the law in many places dictated that only the rich could wear them.

As wealth grew, however, the law became less and less necessary to directly force these classifications. We move from enforcing class divisions with sumptuary laws to simply seeing wealth limit the choices of the poor and expand them for the rich. De jure stratification becomes de facto. For the first time, however, we see an odd reversal with the rich investing in working-class fashions like the frock coat.

Still, for the working class, shoes, and clothing in general, remained a matter of utility. Work boots were not a fashion statement but a necessity of working the docks. A pair of cowboy boots wasn’t meant to be a mark of being southern or western but were legitimately the best possible way to ride horses and do hard ranch work on the plains of the United States.

Meanwhile, the elites slowly invested in less ridiculous, yet equally ritzy, footwear. While a pair of loafers or high-heels – yes, men wore heels for centuries – were nowhere near as impractical as those lovely poulaines, they still lacked the utility of working-class footwear. Loafers didn’t – and don’t – allow the business executive behind a desk to do their job any better than boots or sandals would have, but they denote the fashion of the day and showcase the ability of the executive to afford the shoe in the first place.

By now, the trend should be obvious: the poor have often had to wear shoes that fit their job requirements or their financial restraints, while the rich are free to care about fashion and public perception, disregarding utility. Where things become interesting is in the modern, post-industrial Western world. The United States, the UK and much of Europe have significant middle-class populations, most of whom work white-collar jobs — the type that require loafers, not cowboy boots. This would suggest that those blue-collar styles are disappearing in a sea of three-piece suits and topcoats, and yet the exact opposite is happening. Instead, workwear has been co-opted into what The New York Times Magazine calls the “ever-accelerating chic of ‘yesterday’s blue-collar brands’”.

On top of that, changing economics means the trend isn’t just for the rich anymore. With copycat manufacturing and growing wealth, “Working-class garb of yesterday is to- day’s biggest trend” large swaths of society have the money to follow high fashion trends, and in a strange turn of events, they’re choosing to spend that money on clothes with a working-class origin like chambray shirts and selvedge denim. Unlike recent history, in which the poor tried to dress like the rich, people all over the class spectrum are following the trend introduced by those Industrial-era gentlemen: the working class garb of yesterday is today’s biggest trend.

The odd class-blindness of the trend reveals an underlying classism. Leather, blue-collar-style shoes are outlandishly pricey – just look at a pair of work boots from Redwings. Even in this age of fashion over utility, the wealthy can distinguish themselves through the brand names of their fashion choices, while others hunt for knockoffs and bargains. So, though the trends can be followed by anyone, it’s the quality and the label that remind us all where those age-old divisions lie. Class lines drawn not with poulaines and chopines but with Polo and Jimmy Choo

Midnight on 9th November 1989. In images broadcast around the world, the Berlin Wall is pulled down. People across the world watched live, as the divide between East and West, between communism and capitalism, was destroyed in these instantly iconic images.

The victory of the West and its political ideology of liberalism, the fall of the iron curtain, the rise of David Hasselhoff to inexplicable national treasure status. Call it what you will, but the fall of the Berlin Wall has become recognised amongst the most important events of the twentieth century.

From the ruins of this wall, which had loomed 3.6 metres above the heads of Berliners for fi ve decades, came a 1.3km stretch to be preserved. Representing less than a hundredth of the wall’s original length, this section was to be named The East Side Gallery. Opened in 1990, the wall is the world’s longest-running and largest outdoor gallery, with a permanent exhibition of 105 murals by different painters. The gallery is intended to represent a peaceful world of expression, celebrating ideas of artistic expression and individual freedoms in the liberal tradition. It is a celebration of all that the West held (and continues to hold) dear, and all that the East renounced. It is a historical object as much as it is an art gallery.

But it’s historical import extends beyond representing a definitive moment in German history. It announces the victory of neoliberalism, of late capitalism, and individualism across the world. The communist East fell, and in the vacuum that followed the market found room to expand. The fall of the Berlin Wall represents the extinguishing of the old left, tied to utilitarian conceptions and ideas of Marxist structures. The East Side Gallery is evidence of and the direct result of a milestone in world history.

The murals occupy an interesting position – they are at once both graffiti and state sanctioned art. But where traditional graffiti challenges capitalist conceptions of ownership and private property through its choice of canvas, the East Side Gallery uses graffiti to instead symbolise a diff erent, less clear notion of freedom of expression.

The Gallery’s most famous painting, which depicts the socialist fraternal kiss between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker that sealed an international arms deal back in 1979, has been reproduced around the world. Written in Russian above the painting are the words “God help me to survive this deadly love aff air.” Beyond the tension between the visceral passion of the image and the formal context it is set within (the suits and smart presentation of the two men), the painting’s de facto role as the face of the gallery is unsurprising. It embodies all that the gallery holds dear. It re-contextualises the past through its use of the photograph, as the wall itself turns a former means of oppression into art. It’s highly political, as the gallery itself inescapably is. And it’s the site of continued reworkings of meaning, particularity in light of Russia’s ongoing anti-LGBT policies. This too the gallery itself has faced through being actually graffi tied by street artists keen to have their work exhibited on perhaps the world’s most famous wall.

After extensive and ongoing restorative work since 2009 the gallery looks to remain a huge part of Berlin’s cultural identity and a cultural touchstone recognised in Instagrams and Facebook posts across the globe. But beyond a cool point-winning backdrop for some sixth former’s interrailing status update, the East Side Gallery stands as a testament to the victory of capitalism over communism, of the power of images in a media society, and ultimately of the neo-liberal world’s ability to neutralise and utilise all that stands against it – even graffiti.