Spanish cave
drawings from more than 15,000 years ago show humans with animal skins or furs
wrapped around their feet. The body of a well-preserved “ice-man” nearly 5,000
years old wears leather foot coverings stuffed with straw. Shoes, in some form
or another, have been around for a very long time. The evolution of foot
coverings, from the sandal to present-day athletic shoes that are
marvels of engineering, continues even today as we find new materials with
which to cover our feet.
Has
the shoe really changed that much though? We are, in fact, still wearing
sandals – the oldest crafted foot covering known to us. Moccasins are still readily available in the
form of the loafer. In fact, many
of the shoes we wear today can be traced back to another era. The Cuban heel may have been named for the dance
craze of the 1920s, but the shape can be seen long before that time. Platform soles, which are one of the
most recognizable features of footwear in the 1970s and 1990s were handed down
to us from 16th centurychopines. Then, high soles were a necessity to keep the
feet off of the dirty streets. Today, they are worn strictly for fashion’s
sake. The poulaine, with its
ridiculously long toes is not that different from the winkle-pickers worn in the 1960s.
If
one can deduce that basic shoe shapes have evolved only so much, it is
necessary to discover why this has happened. It is surely not due to a lack of
imagination – the colors and materials of shoes today demonstrate that. Looking
at shoes from different parts of the world, one can see undeniable
similarities. While the Venetians were wearing the chopine, the Japanese
balanced on high-soled wooden shoes called geta.
Though the shape is slightly different, the idea remains the same. The
Venetians had no contact with the Japanese, so it is not a case of imitation.
Even the mystical Chinese practice of foot binding has been copied (though to a
lesser extent) in our culture. Some European women and men of the past bound
their feet with tape and squashed them into too-tight shoes. In fact, a survey
from the early 1990s reported that 88 percent of American women wear shoes that
are too small!
As
one examines footwear history, both in the West and in other parts of the
world, the similarities are apparent. Though the shoemakers of the past never
would have thought to pair a sandal with a platform sole, our shoe fashions of
today are, for the most part, modernized adaptations of past styles.
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