In "Provenance" by Ann Leckie what is the significance of shoes and hair pins?

Question

I just finished Provenance by Ann Leckie and really enjoyed it. Who did the shoes belong to that Ingray used to hit the Omkem captain? Was there something I missed regarding the hair pins?

Answer 1

The provenence (ahem) of the shoes that Ingray used to attack Captain Hatqueban is a surprisingly subtle question.

The shoes first appear when the group enters the First Assembly Chambers. The chamber is in some disarray:

It seemed as though a session had been in progress when the Federacy had attacked. Things were strewn across the low tables between the benches—a cup and decanter here, a handheld and stylus there, even a pair of shoes sticking out from beneath the bench Ingray sat on.

When Ingay triggers the intruder alert, the chamber is plunged into darkness, and the mechs are taken over by Hwae operatives. One of the compromised mechs picks Ingray up, and scoops up the shoes too:

“Oh, here, don’t forget your shoes.” It hooked its huge gun onto its side and then picked up the shoes under the bench Ingray had been lying on and set them in her lap.

Ingay protests that they are not her shoes, in what becomes a running joke for the rest of the book. The shoes are described as:

heavy in her lap, almost boots, with thick, hard soles, and definitely too large for her. Maybe it was something that had come into style in the months she’d been gone at Tyr Siilas. Or maybe the Assembly representative who owned them wanted to be thought of as someone who did hands-on, hard work, the sort that would require heavy foot protection.

So within the book, it seems that the shoes simply belong to one of the First Assembly, which consists of eight members. Ingray certainly seems satisfied with this explanation. But the shoes are mentioned so often, and the fact that there was apparently no reason for the mech to have picked them up (other than their later role as deus ex machina) that many readers believe there is a deeper significance to them. All the author has said on the topic is the rather guarded statement:

The importance of the shoes is that they aren’t Ingray’s. More than that, I must leave to the reader.

As to the hairpins, there doe not seem any relation between them and the shoes. In her tumblr, Leckie explains that:

at the beginning of Provenance Ingray is very near tears and losing her hairpins (the hairpins were a physical detail that just struck me as relatable and a way to put I guess I’d call it physicality in the scene)

so they are just a way of adding some human detail to the character.