It's no different in principle than when the ideal beauty was so pale, blue veins showed through her skin. A swarthy peasant women had skin like an old catcher's mitt by the time she was fourteen. Things change and when the working class moved into dark factories and grew pale, nothing said class, like a good suntan.
The foot binding is a bizarre practice, along the lines of female genital mutilation. It is inflicted on young girls before they are old enough to understand the reasoning. There are many apocryphal stories of how the practice began. Maybe it was just a desire for smaller feet, but my favorite origin myth concerns a Chinese Emperor who combined a foot fetish and a desire for anal penetration.
