Look at this picture for the way varieties of footwear express people’s different identities in society. Each kind of shoe is a designed social object. In this poster, each designed object works as a metonym; each shoe reveals the bigger whole that is associated with it. It is a sociological principle that, because we are rich in designed objects, modern societies communicate about people by using metonymies like this. They fill our media and art. Metonyms have largely replaced symbolic expression which past state and tribal societies used. Past civilizations, which were trying to communicate the transcendental, relied on metaphor, which tries to show how something different from itself is a symbol that reveals an aspect that we cannot see. That was a kind of poetic way of seeing the world – as something magical and different from the Earthly and human. Notice how the poster is very modern in that it asks us to connect, metonymically, this-worldly things with what we cannot see so easily, namely the inner identities of people around us.
